Pinion

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Rico, Monica, 811.6 Ri
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Plays & Poetry / Rico, Monica	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	811.6 Ri	4-week checkout	Due 02-12-2025

"Pinion, Monica Rico Four Way Books 2024"-- Provided by publisher.
"“I / step into the kitchen because I can / no longer smell the lilac / bush my father cut down,” Monica Rico writes in the opening poem of her astonishing debut collection. Deeply invested in unearthing women’s identity from a patriarchal family structure, these pages catalog life beside loss, the truth of cruelty accompanied by a defiant vitality. Here, where the declaration “I can” is modified to “I can / no longer,” Rico untangles the paradox of love, how a persistent absence keeps the missing object present, asserting itself through grief and memory; the scent of lilac lingers precisely because we cannot smell it anymore. The dual meaning of “pinion” scaffolds this collection, which considers Rico’s family and their experiences in the context of her grandparents’ immigration to the USA from México, American racial capitalism, and the mass migration catalyzed and necessitated by Western colonialism. “Pinion” in noun form refers to a bird’s outer flight feathers; in verb form, it means to bind or sever this part of the wing to hinder flight. Bound up in this word, then, is a thing and its destruction – a possibility and a thwarted hope side by side. Rico creates her own motifs to write a representative genealogy, approaching her family as an ornithologist: across poems, her grandfather (who worked at General Motors) appears as an owl, her grandmother figures as a robin, and the American project shows up in the eagle’s warped beak and surveilling eye. A field work of restoration, these poems compose a personal history and a deconstruction of global capitalism as articulated through an encyclopedia of birds. From the chaos of our flawed world, Rico salvages an enduring hope, reminding us that “a broken / song like an ugly duckling isn’t ugly / but unique, and stands out like the flightless / dodo who trusts because it is too awful not to.”"-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Wonderful, very Michigan collection submitted by redwood on July 14, 2024, 9:57am This collection is very, very Michigan. It’s grounded especially in Rico’s hometown—“I return to the constellation named Saginaw,” the first poem ends. Many of my favorite poems draw on Rico’s father and grandfather’s labor on the lines at General Motors, from hot metal to racial discrimination. Elsewhere, she writes of walking in Northern Michigan and of Lake Michigan’s waters.

As the cover art hints, birds are a huge part of this collection. Rico sees them; she and her family become them. An owl for a grandfather comes up again and again. Owls run into crows, ravens, woodpeckers. The bird imagery also hints at migration. Immigration is a constant though more subtle theme, and Mexican American identity is front and center. Rico takes some commonly used images and ideas—for example, tortillas, or Diego Rivera—and makes them entirely her own.

Rico writes a lot about food, exploring race and gender roles in ways that are always complex, filled with ideas of marriage, inheritance, health, even refusal. And nothing in here is really a “food poem”—food imagery sits comfortably alongside, or sometimes interrupts, other kinds.

These poems are environmental, archival, speculative, defiantly emotional. It’s a wonderful collection