Review: A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed

A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed by Anthony Seidman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthony Seidman’s third collection of poetry, A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed, unveils a liminal space parsimoniously claimed by many as a border and invites the reader not only to cross over, but to perforate the concept itself. This collection builds around objects that are seemingly mundane, like an “Uncapped Pen,” until it reaches profundity. Seidman takes something explicit and sublunary – “Coatlicue, Whose Name Means ‘Serpent Skirt’” – and sends the reader on a journey through the ancient and the modern, the past and future, the present and the nostalgic; ages, visions, and states converge in an ornate poetic wandering, submerging the reader into the ebb and flow of continuity and transformation.

Seidman’s liminal space awakened a memory of my days at the university, when I studied border cultures – specifically, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, with its focus on the (im)possibilities of borderlands, a geographical area sensitive to hybridity. However, Seidman manifests a different approach to dialoguing about the possible domain of the borderland and proves that poetry is a veritable and noble way of engaging the linguistic hybridity, creating a completely autonomous dialogue that can flow independently. This book is a sustainment, or maybe a suspension, of this liminal area, held by a long thread stitched with poems that share rhythm and structure, with repetitions of certain words establishing a thematic backbone. Examples include the black dog, which appears multiple times in the collection – in one instance, as the soul of the poet in “2300 BC Emperor Yao” – and fronds, which recur in descriptions of a goddess’s brow and in those of a verdurous jungle.

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An ode to Amenaza

Edited by Olga García (Garden Oak Press, 2015)
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My translation of the poem Soneto La Carpio by poet, translator, and friend David Shook was published this past year in the bilingual anthology Frontera Piel/Skin Border. "It is an ode to his 'cock'"– as Andrew Perez of The Sun writes. Amenaza was a fighting cock purchased while David and I were living in Costa Rica back in 2008. Together we frequented the furrowed dirt streets (now mostly paved) of La Cueva del Sapo, or La Carpio. Cock fighting and breeding was not hard to come by in the neighborhood veined by a myriad of streets. Subversive to the hills of higher class neighborhoods in the hills, La Carpio is like an excavation, or quarry, squatted and developed by Nicaraguan refugees. One has to descend into La Carpio. In doing so, the individual cannot escape contemplating the neighborhood that beautifully takes to task societal structure and questions a collective majority that acquiesces the marginalized in present day structures.

The underpinning of the neighborhood is an organic response to fundamental needs for survival, escape, settlement (planting roots), raising families, and creating a collective identity in a foreign land.  At the age of 17 I did not realize the commonalties I shared with many of the friends in the neighborhood, nor my personal need for survival, escape, settlement, and a collective identity. La Carpio and its people were enriching my identity, deconstructing it and restructuring it. My preconceived notions of existence and life as I knew it were befuddled much to the breach found in language and privilege.

La Carpio's presence in San Jose subversively began, has grown, and now thrives. Shook has astutely taken a form, deconstructed it and restructured it, and possibly echoed this sequence. His sonnet has been molded into the flow and rhythm of life in La Carpio. His poetics bring a closeness to the investment of putting money towards a fighting cock in hopes for entertainment, winnings, and pride. It represents individuals identifying with risk, importance, and success while being battered daily by monotony, shallow pockets, and marginalization. Gruesome like a cock fight, David tears apart the traditional Sonnet and transfigures it with precision– fitting it like a glove on the milieu of La Carpio. The poem calls for a plummet into the opulent exposure found in La Carpio and its microcosm. I am grateful to have translated this poem, grateful to see her in print in a bilingual edition, grateful for David's ode to Amenaza, and grateful to a neighborhood and individuals that marked me deeply, much like the iron talons that continue to mark and slit a more recent generation of cocks in La Cueva del Sapo.