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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
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      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
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    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
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Book Review: Sad Girl Poems
by Christopher Soto

Sad Girl Poems
Christopher Soto
Sibling Rivalry Press
2016
978-1-94-397703-1
39 pages
$10


Christopher (Loma) Soto is a queer, Latinx, Brooklyn-based poet. Soto is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). In 2015, Soto cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign with Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Their poems can also be found in the Boston Review, PEN America, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Literary Hub, Vinyl Poetry, and Hyperallergic. 
​

Review





















A Review of Christopher Soto's Sad Girl Poems by Miguel Soto

Christopher Soto’s Sad Girl Poems deal with violent, macrosocial issues, affecting young, queer, people of color. Soto’s narrative poems follow a traumatic past, referring to homelessness, familial abuse, gender identity, and the haunting, reoccurring voice of the speaker’s dead lover, Rory. In the preface, Soto makes their motive for writing clear, being that marginalized voices are so often muted in society. Soto’s poems transmit sadness into anger, and uses that anger as the fuel for mobilizing toward respect and dignity for marginalized voices. Their tone is direct and effective:
Don’t just feel bad about our stories, consume us, & spit us out […] I want you to give your money to the Ali Forney Center & financially support queer homeless youth. I want you to donate your money to Black & Pink to support queer folks in prisons.[1]
Christopher Soto’s narrative poems produce insight through the personal traumas they experience, demonstrating the vulnerability and power that comes from reclaiming voice from a silent isolation.
 
In “Those Sundays,” the speaker’s memory is taken over by two characters: their father and Rory. The beginning lines reflect negatively on the father: “he’d come / home with his cracked hands & bad attitude.” The memory of Rory interrupts the speaker’s negative view of the father: “I’d rather talk about Rory now […] / How the sun would comb crowns into / his hair.” For the speaker, Rory acts as an ideal escape from the familial abuse the speaker emphasizes. Specifically, in the fourth stanza, when the speaker calls to mind, “that night, after my father smashed / the television glass with his baseball / bat,” and the speaker seeks Rory, remembering, “[Rory] saw / my goose bumps from the cold. & / he felt my bruises, as they became / a part of him.” The speaker’s connection with Rory imparts empathy, drawing on the pattern many queer youths of color face within their families, and their desire to connect with others facing the same issues. In the fifth stanza, the speaker intends to “carry all the burden,” for both themself and Rory, but the only consolation the speaker can offer is, “nobody has to know about us, not my father / not yours— / No, not even God.” The final line of “Those Sundays” exemplifies the secrecy that grows between queer youths of color, who feel safest outside of everyone’s and everything’s periphery, demonstrating the start of marginalization at home, and then the way that forced isolation develops into constant fear and anxiety. Although the narrative is personal, the experience reflects many queer people of color, exacting a critical examination of familial dynamics, while demanding the safety of queer youths of color to be a priority.
 
Another aspect that extends from familial dynamics is the speaker’s contemplation in “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Gay Ghetto.” The subject is a queer person of color’s position within religion, referring to two acclaimed writers to support the perspective:
Lorde know(s) cis-hets don’t like me.
Baldwin know(s) how white homos exoticize me.
I hope heaven got a gay ghetto.
Where my QPOC family don’t feel shame.
The references to Audre Lorde and James Baldwin reinforce the decades of theoretical research and analysis put into criticizing society’s view against queer people of color, and the anger that comes from having to pick-up and further the work that both Lorde and Baldwin put a lifetime into. The speaker augments their point by revolutionizing the way readers think of people who adhere to the gender assigned to them at birth, and follow a heteronormative orientation: “cis-het.” The word choice opens a dialectic between gender conforming and gender non-conforming people, acting as a tool for visibility for queer and gender non-conforming people. In the conversation between gender conforming and gender non-conforming people is the need for refuge from violence that “cis-hets” enact on queer people of color, so much so, the speaker believes not even death would free them from the fear and anxiety that comes from living in a cis-heteronormative society.
 
Soto’s voice remains active throughout all their poems, calling to action people’s attention, intending to mobilize readers for the needs of queer people of color. In “Ars Poetica,” the speaker’s poetic art is to create and fuel activism: “I want everything to have purpose— / the beak, the bones, the baby blue / Vodka veins,” and yet the speaker confesses, “this is such a useless fucking poem.” The speaker admits to the emotional exhaustion that comes from narrating the experiences of themself and Rory, especially when the experiences meet an intersection of complacency and carelessness from others. The speaker further confesses, “None of this is about Rory / it’s all about me,” making the reader question the speaker’s transparency, being reflective of the way the speaker must question their reason for writing. There is insight in acknowledging self-interest, especially since the speaker discloses Rory’s death in earlier poems, allowing the reader to understand that the speaker’s own survival translates to the survival of other queer people of color. The mode of self-interest illustrates where fear emerges from, when the pain of Rory’s reccurring memory appears, clarifying the cryptic relationship between the speaker and the speaker’s memory of Rory.
 
Christopher Soto’s Sad Girl Poems relate pain and sadness—as it intends to do, influencing readers to react and respond. The narrative poems Soto speaks through, move and fluctuate emotions, forcing radical change in language, feeling, and action. Soto’s collection of poems is ideal for the reader searching for a method to sublimate feelings of anger, exhaustion, sadness, and despair with living in a cis-heteronormative society that refuses to easily accept the existence of queer and trans people of color. Christopher Soto’s Sad Girl Poems confess and despair, but continue to breathe through the living queer bodies of color, adapting to survive every day.



[1] Link to donate and support the Ali Forney Center: https://www.aliforneycenter.org/get-involved/, and a link to donate and support Black & Pink: https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/blackandpink

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Miguel is the Asst. Managing Editor and Book Review Editor for Jet Fuel Review. As an editor, one of his main concerns is giving a space to marginalized voices, centralizing on narratives often ignored. He loves reading radical, unapologetic writers, who explore the emotional and intellectual stresses within political identities and systemic realities. His own writings can be found in OUT / CAST: A Journal of Queer Midwestern Writing and Art, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Rogue Agent. He writes for the Jet Fuel Review blog in Not Your Binary: A QTPOC Reading Column.


​

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  • Home
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
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      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
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      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
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      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
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      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
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      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
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      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
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      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022