Tenderness & Rupture: A Review of Alejandro Lucero’s Sapello Son

Reviewed by katie pelkey

We remember a fire by the scorched earth it leaves behind. Likewise, the poems in Alejandro Lucero's first chapbook, Sapello Son, behave like smoldering remnants of the past. He writes of people and places only reachable by way of memory ignited by image. In “Mom’s Chair” he writes: "The un-ashed cigarettes showered burn holes into her / chair. Homemade / craters on the arms. A homemade planet/ we threw away.”

The images throughout the collection are couched in language that is evocative and unflinching. Lucero's syntactically driven lines build momentum, just as a good joke builds anticipation and surprise. In “Searching” he admits: "I avoid / churches now. That first row pew, pew-pewing away. / Wood marbled smooth by asses in dress clothes.” As much as the collection is lined in pain, it is paved with a keen sense humor, turn after turn.   

In terms of both thematic content and form, the collection is expansive and exploratory. No poem feels constrained by its shape, rather, its position on the page introduces new ways of reading or experiencing. Notably, in "Pop Quiz with Ninth Inning Sweats" opposing ideas within the poem can be reinforced or negated without being limited by finality. An answer to the question "When did you last hug your mother?" is never offered. We are asked to examine all choices: A, B, C, D. I am compelled by how the poem manages to show that multiple answers, even conflicting ones, can be true at once.

In "Things My Mother Forgets," the poet articulates what his mother cannot, having forgotten the items which hold meaning to other members of the family. "A policeman called. Dad and I met him in a parking lot, my mother waiting / in his back seat, smoking a cigarette she forgot to light." In the aftermath of experience, language remains for the speaker, but not his mother. The juxtaposition of poetic remembrance against his mother's inability to articulate her past is what makes the image of her smoking the cigarette so resonant. This is one of many images I contemplated after having closed the book.

Lucero's chapbook combines lyricism with prosody, narratives with fragments, all held together by pages of tenderness and rupture. His poems make raw and imagined experience carry the same emotional weight. They are as much of a pleasure to read as they are to reread, again and again. I look forward to his debut poetry manuscript, At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light, set to release in the Spring of 2027 from Boa Editions.

Sapello son by alejandro lucero

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bUll city press, 2022

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Poetry chapbook

/ 42 pages / $12.95

Katie Pelkey is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry and teacher at SU. She often writes about humanity's enduring preoccupations: sex and death.