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Book Review: This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album by Alan Chazaro
Alan Chazaro is a former high school teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and June Jordan Poetry for the People scholar at UC Berkeley. This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album was the winner of the Spring 2018 Black River Chapbook Competition. Chazaro’s debut full-length collection, Piñata Theory, was awarded the 2018 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. His poems have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Puerto del Sol, Huizache, Acentos Review, and Ninth Letter.
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Review
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A Review of Alan Chazaro's This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album
Alan Chazaro’s This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album delivers the confessional voice of a young Latino man growing up in the Bay Area. In “580 West,” Chazaro mimics the styling of a coastline, beginning first with the appearance of the landscape before setting off into the cartographic details that truly characterize the writer’s home. The musicality of “580 West” contains a duality that shapes the poem’s language as descriptors center on the city’s sounds: Listen: this is scorpions in the dark, the buzz of moonlight Chazaro’s poems follow the styling of cartography by defining each poem’s experience, and then interrogating the restrictions between the subject’s borders, like those between setting and individual, boyhood and manhood, music and language, and joy and shame.
In examining the relationship between setting and individual, “A Millennial Walks into a Bar and Says:” is a poem that illustrates the conflation between physical and virtual reality, which works to define a generation’s anxiety with digital spaces as they interact with others in public. Each line is an outpour of information that shares almost no relation to one another, except for the musical conceit weaving each memory. For example: “Nothing / like US military drones missing their targets. Nothing. / But everything like jazz quartets” and “Tchoupitoulas; Calliope; St. Claude. Find me / there. I want to remix the wrongs and make a mixtape / of imperfection.” The poem also depicts personal conflict: “I’m Mexican just as I really can’t say / I’m American. Someone built this bridge between me. They carved / hyphens from the air for me to cross.” Furthermore, the speaker’s revelation is like many millennial Latinxs, revisiting the social construction of Latinidad unique to the U.S., which forcefully questions the conflation of national identity, ethnicity, and the language that defines the category. Technology takes the forefront in a piece that begins in a bar, illustrating the impact technology imposes on how people become overloaded with search results: “How this can all pour / from my fingers in a matter of minutes like outdated / newspapers.” Chazaro’s “A Millennial Walks into a Bar and Says:” is a generation’s song about people’s relationship with technology in social settings, and more importantly, the challenges individuals face with themselves when having access to an abundance of information. In relation to questionable sources of information, “Some of Our Boyhoods” inspects role models of manhood that begin as an ode: “praise the older cousins.” In this poem, the speaker revisits his boyhood, speaking of his role models as knowledgeable and well-rounded: “where we got our cool from, pretended like we knew / what good weed smelled like, how to slide a condom on.” Although amusing, the tone of the poem later shifts to one of shaming, where the act of imitation is internalized, and the kids grow up to act as their older cousins. As the piece ties memories together, there is a moment when a boy cries after losing his hamster, and the “cool” response is to name him “a fuckin’ fag.” Interrogating gendered socialization is a common theme throughout Chazaro's chapbook. For instance, in “Pretty,” the speaker describes acceptable attitudes for young men in high school: “we’d only touch / through fist / & gorilla chest;” and by using a past-tense voice to make a point in hindsight indicates the challenge of surpassing learned behaviors that suppress expressing emotions between men. Not only does the speaker examine rigid attitudes imposed on men, but also the illogical method of language becoming gendered. The title “Pretty” gives importance to the poet’s point, particularly when the speaker notes his discomfort with the word “pretty:”: “to say pretty / would be hella gay of me.” The poem depicts the speakers’ past, one that conforms to macho characteristics exemplified by role models and social attitudes; however, by shifting tenses in both poems, readers see the growth in criticizing rigid gender constructions. Alan Chazaro’s This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album is a musical tour of the Bay Area, mapping memory and confession across a landscape of issues prevailing over millennials and younger generations. Each poem’s ability to loudly reveal a façade, of what feels like a recurring speaker, reminds readers: “shame is a parade / of licking tongues and everyone is / invited.” Rap being prevalent in Chazaro’s Bay Area makes sound a perfect conceit for identity as music follows a specific theory of beats, melody, harmony, and rhythm; and yet, music, like our speaker, fluctuates and changes for growth. Alan Chazaro’s This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album is a full-volume “parade” set to invite listeners to a series of individual growths as each poem’s façade expands into a sonic city. |
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Miguel is a Lewis University alum. He is the Book Review Editor for Jet Fuel Review. He has been published in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, 30N, EFNIKS, Rogue Agent, The Rising Phoenix Review among other places. He is a fellow of the Wolny Writing Residency. He also writes for the Jet Fuel Review blog: Not Your Binary: A QTPOC Reading Column.
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