Farid Matuk’s The Real Horse and Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction begin inside enclosures from which they imagine and build arguments for radical forms of liberation. Matuk’s second book opens in a box, Trevino’s first in a jail cell. From within these spaces of confinement, as their titles indicate, Matuk and Trevino question what is considered “real” and what “fiction,” including the violence (oppressive and emancipatory) these concepts conceal. They do so primarily through what Matuk calls “something like sonnets.” As Terrance Hayes puts it in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, this sort of sonnet “lock[s] you in,” functioning as “part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.”[1] Alongside Hayes’s “American sonnets,” which are themselves modeled on Wanda Coleman’s sonnets and John Murillo’s sonnet sequence, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” from his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, Matuk’s and Trevino’s sonnet sequences represent perhaps the most incisive iterations of what the critic Dan Chiasson has called American poetry’s “sonnet surge.” While Hayes’s and Murillo’s sonnets tackle antiblackness in its brutalizing United Statesian forms, Matuk’s and Trevino’s sonnets confront the globalized epistemic, linguistic, and material violences deployed in support of racial capitalism’s perpetuation. And they critique a specific iteration of global capitalism at that—what the Mexican activist and intellectual Sayak Valencia calls “gore capitalism,” where the accumulation is in bodies.
Cruel Fiction’s opening poem, “From Santa Rita 128-131,” inhabits a prison cell or, more precisely, “5 different ‘tanks’” in the Santa Rita jail, after the poet and others were arrested during Occupy Oakland in January 2012. The series of ninety-eight standalone sentences calls to mind the simultaneous linguistic and juridical registers of “sentence,” while implicitly alluding to similarly situated poetries. It recalls the Chicana/o/x “pinto” poets, including Judy Lucero, who wrote under the nom de plume #21918, her prison number. As “a list of things remembered,” it evokes the “count” poems in One Big Self, C. D. Wright’s investigation of mass incarceration in Louisiana, and poems by political prisoners, as gathered in Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting.
The first seventy sentences of “From Santa Rita 128-131” each begin with a recognizable poetic “I,” as in “I was cold approximately 43 hours,” “I saw 5 slices of bologna stick to a white wall,” and “I met 1 woman whose mother had bailed out Huey Newton.” By the end of the poem, however, Trevino’s “I” has dispersed into a radical collectivity that erupts into the second poem’s subjectless first sentence: “Santander Bank was smashed into!” This dispersal constitutes one of Trevino’s most powerful interventions. From the beginning, Cruel Fiction makes its “I” accountable to a collective “we.” This “we” exists beyond the confines of poems and their readers, and it is galvanized by the poems in order to “smash” the capitalist order in the streets where collective identity remains secondary to militant action. Trevino’s conception of poetic labor foregrounds this relationship. On August 26, 2019, she tweeted her gratitude to readers, remarking that the attention Cruel Fiction has received “gives me hope that ‘we’ will all be reading a lot less/be in the streets a lot more (again) in the near future.”
Trevino writes deft sentences with lucidly articulated political stakes, and her sonnets in particular feature prominent caesura created by frequent punctuation and elastic enjambments. In contrast, other than its first poem, Matuk’s The Real Horse eschews easily scannable sentences, as defined by the marked visual language of initial capital letters and end-stopped punctuation as well as quickly identifiable agents and actions. While this aesthetic can be traced to modernists and mid-century poets, it most closely resembles two of Matuk’s contemporaries: the Roberto Tejada of Full Foreground and the Fred Moten of Hughson’s Tavern (both poets blurbed The Real Horse). Consider the representative phrase “mica in the mosaic of the bank portico” in the third poem, “A Daughter Having Been of the Type,” one of four long poems. Because such elemental, granular, and layered images—which Trevino’s wiry, declarative sentences strategically elude—defy linear logic, the reader must assemble the surrounding fragments into a mosaic rather than a sequence. That’s why the “complete” sentences of The Real Horse’s short first piece are important—the epistolary proem “[Dear daughter]” gives implicit instructions to both the reader and the poet’s daughter. Matuk writes, “I started these poems as a way to see you even before you arrived, anxious about how the body we gave you would bear power’s projections.” Here “you” is the poet’s daughter, but it’s also the reader (who has just now “arrived”) and, later in the book, the poems’ historical actors. “You” thus shifts between an intimate “you” and the “you”s across space and time in whom that specific “you” is reflected, contained, identified, and let loose.
“[Dear daughter]” first introduces a box by referring to Dawn Lundy Martin’s collection Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (foreshadowing later allusions to Henry Box Brown), then a cage through the performance artist Tehching Hsieh (“he was undocumented in the 1980s, like me”). Matuk links these forms to poetic constraints: “Where these poems are something like sonnets, I’m trying to draw the box a song makes in the air, a box into which we can turn away.” “[Dear daughter]” ends with a gift for the daughter that doubles as a guide for the reader: “Inside, I took out what punctuation I could to make more room for you.” In contrast to the heavily punctuated Cruel Fiction, where the title sonnet “[A border, like race, is a cruel fiction]” uses seven commas (all internal to lines) and ten periods (all but two internal to lines) to accentuate through caesura its seven references to “violence” as the purpose of a border, The Real Horse’s erasure of punctuation entrusts daughter and reader with the interpretive agency to form their own sentences. If Trevino invites readers to join a “we” in the streets, Matuk invites them to become the “you” in his pages. This “you” diverges from the one Evie Shockley sees in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Whereas Rankine’s “lyric-You” “thrusts every reader into the position of speaker and addressee simultaneously,” Matuk’s “you” moves between specific figures and the many “you”s comprising a future “we.”
I’ve spent so much time on these two books’ beginnings because they are instructive for at least three reasons. First, Trevino’s and Matuk’s opening pieces teach us how to (re)read their books and from where: spaces of confinement with others, all of whom are collectively bound in agitating for emancipation. Second, on initial read, Trevino’s syntax seems straightforward, while Matuk’s frequently seems impenetrable. But the ease with which Trevino’s sentences move is misleading, and the lack of punctuation in The Real Horse intentionally obscures the goals of meaning-making Matuk outlines in “[Dear daughter].” In fact, subsequent readings flip each first reading’s relationship to difficulty: The Real Horse gets “easier,” opening wider for readers, who begin to hear the absent punctuation, while Trevino’s “we” becomes more “difficult,” growing in size, range, and complexity.
Third, their openings delineate the living character of their source materials and social commitments. Whereas the more discursive Cruel Fiction forgoes notes, The Real Horse’s long Notes section precedes a list of texts, sites, and performances called “See also reservoir, friend, figure, mirror, obstruction, horse.” Both books share an allegiance to “friends” summoned in their pages (e.g., Martin, in Matuk’s case; Raquel Salas Rivera and many comrades whose surnames go unmentioned, in Trevino’s) and the resistant cultures they make together. They diverge in how they write this archive: Matuk “swirl[s] the reservoir / of what was said”; Trevino composes through “a constant refashioning of the on-hand.” If these techniques attend equally to extant materials, they differ in how they make poems from them. “Swirling” produces a sensorial and epistemic disorientation reflected in Matuk’s multidirectional lines. “Refashioning” indicates the precise shape and locution of Trevino’s sculptural sonnets.
Matuk’s and Trevino’s shared object of critique is simultaneously “real” and a “cruel fiction”: what Matuk calls “a claim to life” and its corollary, the so-called “good life” promised by submission to capital’s imperatives. Matuk repeats “a claim to life” five times, and though its definition, like ideology, is purposefully slippery, the claim is clearly violent and exclusionary, explicitly tied to whiteness and capitalist class relations. In short, the liberal project of colonial modernity makes an exclusive “claim to life.” In The Real Horse, this claim conceals perversities (lynching, bestiality, drone warfare) in racial capitalism’s twin fetishes of property (both material and literary) and propriety (as in the current calls for “civility” in the face of fascism): “if I just write what I know / I won’t use anybody is part of the fantasy of being discreet / in a body as a claim to life.” Through Matuk’s serpentine syntax, we intuit that his “white enough” daughter will eventually have a choice to make about where to stand: with the purveyors of “the fantasy” or with those taking a “pledge of resistance” against US imperialism.
An anti-imperialist “pledge” likewise guides Cruel Fiction’s thirty-sonnet sequence “Brazilian Is Not a Race.” The sequence shows how capitalist ideology passes off this “claim to life,” which is juridically and culturally reserved for white bodies, as a “shared” universal. “You can share a country,” Trevino writes, “Like you can share a culture—with people / Who want you to disappear, who would take / Everything from you & still want you gone.” Here Trevino’s “you” is prelude to a militant “we” that would resist the systemic violence produced by this narrow “claim to life.” She and Matuk suggest that numerous historical “claims” ground United Statesian culture: slave owners’ claims to human property; settlers’ claims to stolen indigenous lands; states’ exclusive claims to violence; home and business owners’ insurance claims following “natural” disasters; publishers’, artists’, and tech bros’ philosophical claims to intellectual property; employers’ claims to workers’ time; corporations’ claims to legal personhood; men’s claims to women’s bodies; and so on. In the book’s other thirty-sonnet sequence “Popular Culture & Cruel Work,” Trevino dexterously reveals how pop culture gives “power’s projections” material form, legitimating the claim to life and sublimating it to extract profit from its cruelty.
Out of this mutual critique, the books build distinctive modes for challenging the claim’s dominion over all forms of life. Trevino’s first-person plural “we” and Matuk’s second-person plural “you” offer porous, mutually reinforcing positions from which to confront capitalism and to build more capacious, just, and dignified lifeworlds beyond the individuated enlightenment language of property “claims.” Near the end of Cruel Fiction’s first section, the fierce prose meditation “The We of a Position” steers the two following thirty-sonnet sequences, which dramatize a nimble mind working through how this “we” might look, speak, and act. In the terms of “[Dear daughter],” Matuk’s sequences navigate the you of a projection, where each “you” is summoned and objectified by “power’s projections.” Yet because “you” shifts into plurality, like Trevino’s “we,” it entails a latent collective agency against that power. After all, both pronominal forms—“we” and “you”—are shaped in and by the violence of an authoritarian “they.” As Trevino insists in her title sonnet, this is a “Violence no one can confuse for / Anything but violence. So much violence / Changes relationships, births a people / They can reason with.” The conspicuous prepositional phrase “reason with” implies the exertion of rational and legal claims on people’s bodies and their origin stories. At the same time, the state rejects the constraints of “reason” in the physical destruction of these very bodies and the collective stories they carry within them.
Various projections of a multitudinous “you” suture the disjunctive associations of Matuk’s sonnet sequences. In “A Daughter the Real Horse,” the projection takes on striking historical form: a “scrolling panorama” of mirrored words projected over the naked body of the performer Adah Menken, who is bound to a horse trampling across a Civil War–era stage. In this case, “you” is Menken’s ambiguously racialized body, but it’s also the poet’s daughter and all the women and girls who endure the white gaze. “If I could be one of the rooms / you pass through on your way of out of you,” Matuk wistfully imagines. In the next poem, “A Daughter That She May Touch the Deployments,” he wonders, “can a daughter finally ‘be unavailable’ / to whatever various slants of porn light would try to share or foreclose you.” Matuk’s second-person plural “you” calls into language a transhistorical collective subject with the capacity to shift social positions and locations. After all, in any “we” move, jostle, and cooperate multiple “you”s.
“You” moves most forcefully though the book’s final sequence, “No Address.” In this poem, Matuk makes space for his daughter to subvert
categories and to elude the police state, which aims at all times to pin each “you” to a physical location. “No Address” begins with a diagram juxtaposing Henry Box Brown to Rachel Corrie, the United Statesian woman who laid her white body in front of an IDF bulldozer in 2003. Here’s the second sonnet’s concluding octave:
I can make my bad teeth better and hang a little gold
at your wrist any verb could turn to a new feeling
waking glad to remain an owner
if whiteness or a people is a claim to life you slept through
the night in a house that stands
and our papers are filed with the state so vacationing
we can hike up in the mountain to see the ancient pyramid
above the valley of Tepotzlán honored a tax collector
These jagged lines of run-together clauses disorient where sentences begin and end, shading them into each other. (In contrast, Trevino’s compressed ten-syllable lines resemble a thinking-aloud, but one that weaves tight sentences into blank verse.) Matuk’s sonnets are guided by being a daughter’s father, the child teaching the parent (“the gaze you’ve trained in me”) to inhabit space-time differently. “If parenting is a thing are you childing us who gave you a face,” he asks. “No Address” ultimately inverts the father-child relation: rather than call the child into position via lineage and discipline, the child calls her poet-parent into a position in which “no address” is feasible. Within the (non)space of “No Address,” “you” becomes unmappable, evading surveillance and interpellation by capital, state, and patriarchy. This “you” doesn’t exist outside of language, only apart from totalizing inscriptions, even emancipatory ones. But it’s also “playing a game,” with rules, practices, and strategies, and other players collectively building a “we.”
“The We of a Position” guides Trevino’s sonnets in similar ways. Unlike Matuk’s roomier, multidirectional sonnets, Trevino’s conversational sentences are compressed into gunpowder packets. Using the language that’s “on-hand” means taking seriously pop culture as an engine of gore capitalism. “Popular Culture & Cruel Work” refers to the bodies of Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Selena, JonBenét Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, and Anna Nicole Smith—“the girls whose deaths bring / People together.” A few pages earlier, “The We of a Position” models how to read this process from the perspective of a “we” that’s drawn “together” differently. This “we” encompasses alliances of the imagination, thinking and theorizing around anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggle, what Mark Nowak refers to in Social Poetics as “imaginative militancy,” as well as on-the-ground collective actions. Inevitably messy and contradictory, such a “globalized ‘we,’” as Walt Hunter suggests in Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization, can serve as “the vehicles for a proleptic revolutionary subject and a protean rhetorical performance.”
In Cruel Fiction, this subject and performance proceeds from the situated knowledge of migrant laborers. “The We of a Position” critiques “the hierarchy of the fields” through the eyes of the poet’s Mexican American father, a farmworker who once believed himself superior to Blacks and Mexicans. (In this subtle way, Cruel Fiction and The Real Horse pivot on father-daughter relationships.) Then one day the Mexican American workers needed water, and the father’s realization previews the book’s final poems: “How none of the white people in town [Lubbock, Texas] would give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African American farm hands offered them some. How they didn’t even have to ask. How my father says we’re all living like that—not even knowing who our friends are.” Reflecting on this story, Trevino redefines “we”: “What I am trying to describe is what is described in Tiqqun’s Call as ‘the we of a position.’ A ‘we’ that includes people we do & don’t like. A ‘we’ that includes people we haven’t met yet & people we will never meet. A ‘we’ that sees the hierarchy of the fields & calls bullshit without being dismissive of its bullshit effects. A ‘we’ that is aware of other fields.” In the subsequent sixty sonnets, Trevino’s give-no-fucks poetics makes her commitments clear: ending capitalism and white supremacy means making tricky alliances without “being dismissive” of capitalism’s “bullshit effects,” like the weaponized spectacle of celebrity deaths constituting our “shared” culture.
A powerful symmetry obtains when a poet committed to endings has a knack for them. One swashbuckling sonnet moves from the Sinaloa Cartel to Woody Harrelson; it concludes with Trevino’s signature mode of understated exclamation: “Did drug trafficking / Save the banks during the 2008 / Global financial crisis? Seriously.” Yes, inasmuch as this is a key premise of Sayak Valencia’s “gore capitalism.” Another sonnet ends: “Mexican was / Not a race—not even in the 80s.” Race and borders are indeed the fictions central to Trevino’s and Matuk’s books. Unsurprisingly, Cruel Fiction has circulated online as a book about the border. Commune Editions’ promotional materials, including the back cover, highlight the sonnet that distills Trevino’s triangulation border-race-fiction: “A border, like race, is a cruel fiction / Maintained by constant policing, violence / Always threatening a new map.”
Cruel Fiction best embodies Commune’s aim to be a “purveyor of poetry and other antagonisms,” and Trevino’s phrasing and pacing often resemble Juliana Spahr’s. Yet Cruel Fiction extends Commune’s anti-capitalist project. Trevino’s articulations of her relationship to Chicana/o/x identity formations strengthen the critiques of Heriberto Yépez’s Commune book Transnational Battle Field. As in the story of her father, Cruel Fiction stuns when it thinks through Trevino’s upbringing in the Rio Grande Valley, not to reify authenticity tropes but to question them. This differs slightly from Matuk, who writes obliquely of being a borderlands resident of Peruvian and Syrian descent, as in his reference to his former undocumented status in “[Dear daughter].” Like Trevino, Matuk is skeptical of identity politics when they’re delinked from capitalist critique. He asks what value resides in undocumented status when getting papers—that is, when legitimated as a state subject—means obeisance to capital’s “claims” on bodies as well as on forms of belonging such as citizenship.
For her part, Trevino distrusts identitarian claims made by “Chicano” and “Latinx,” in part because “of all / The Latinos working for” CBP and ICE. While readers might expect a “Chinga La Migra” (“Fuck the Border Patrol”) sonnet, even one written in solidarity with protests against ex-Border Patrol agent Francisco Cantú’s memoir The Line Becomes a River, some will be surprised at critiques of Latinx icons César Chávez and Gloria Anzaldúa. Unlike Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s collection Beast Meridian, which reveres Anzaldúa, Trevino disarms the border theorist’s authority: “I keep trying to see what you all see / In Anzaldúa.” “Brazilian Is Not a Race” triangulates race, origin, and destination on this broken ground:
Where am I going with this? I thought
I knew. It makes sense that whenever race
Comes up, I think about the Rio Grande
Valley—“the Valley” as anyone
Who knows the place calls it. That’s where I learned
I’m not white & what that means & how what
That means changes & doesn’t & to who.
Not coincidentally, Trevino suggests, “Gloria Anzaldúa was also / From the Valley. Her Wikipedia / Page says she was born in Harlingen like / Me.” This enjambed “like / Me” mirrors Matuk’s “like me” on being without papers in the eighties—each acknowledges the comparison by creating distance from it. Trevino concludes that Anzaldúa’s “approach didn’t resonate with me” because her theory of mestizaje is derived from the eugenicist, even fascist, concept of “la raza cósmica” developed by the revolutionary-era Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. Cruel Fiction is theorizing here how tough “the we of a position” is to imagine, let alone vivify. For not only are leftist icons questioned, the fundamental idea on which “we” is formed—no matter how you’re racialized or gendered “you have to hate capitalism”—doesn’t detail how to proceed from there.
To address this question, Cruel Fiction turns to an overlooked historical revolt. After alluding to recent uprisings (Occupy, the Zapatistas), Trevino introduces the 1915 Plan of San Diego. By any measure, the Plan was radical, due to its revolutionary violence (“kill all white American males / Over the age of 16”) and its alliance of Blacks, Natives, and Mexican Americans in south Texas. “That’s the Plan,” Trevino deadpans, “To some people it just doesn’t sound real / But I agree with the historian / Gerald Horne: even ‘if the “Plan” was a / Fiction, massacres of various sorts / Were not.’” And yet Trevino’s sense of what and who counts in an anti-capitalist “we” exceeds this potent example. On the final page, Trevino echoes Matuk when considering the era’s Mexican revolutionaries-in-exile who started a commune in LA: “There has to / Be room for that.”
Matuk creates this “room” by removing punctuation so that “you,” in its singular and plural forms, can “turn away” from capitalism, Trevino by expanding “we” into a burgeoning collective (including people “we” don’t like and may never meet) that may overthrow it. Their barnstorming books ask: Which fictions should be disavowed and destroyed? In which should we believe and participate? The Real Horse’s epigraph from the Salvadoran poet-revolutionary Roque Dalton poses a related question: “Who should the poet’s voice be for?” The answer’s clear: for those, like Dalton, who make room in the world for another world. This unflinching, generative radicalism distinguishes The Real Horse and Cruel Fiction as exemplary poetic antagonisms.
[1] Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018), 11.