Memorias From the Beltway / Mauricio Novoa / Flowersong Press x Red Salmon Press / 2020

Reviewed by Willy Palomo

The Lower East Side of Harlem had Miguel Piñero, Chicago’s southside has Nate Marshall, and with the publication of Memorias From the Beltway in 2020, Maryland has Mauricio Novoa to claim as its homegrown voice, reporting from its barrios and basketball courts. I want to roar that Novoa deserves the same clout and recognition of his contemporaries: hip-hop-influenced and page-pushing poets like John Murillo, whose book Up Jumps the Boogie is one of the most masterful marriages of hip-hop aesthetics to the page poetry and foreshadows the likes of Novoa, or Nate Marshall, whose coming-of-age collection of poetry Wild Hundreds would dab up comfortably against Memorias From the Beltway on any bookshelf.

However, as I read the collection, I found a quiet tenderness unique to Novoa. This intrinsic humility in the speaker’s witness is imbedded into the ethos of the collection. Flip to the acknowledgements and note the lack of bigshot journals where the poems have previously appeared and instead mostly find the names of historically Latinx zines, reviews, and anthologies where Novoa’s poems can be found. Peruse the preface and note how the Executive Director of Red Salmon Arts almost failed to pick up on Novoa’s genius because of his quiet and patient demeanor. Novoa isn’t a poet who does this for the clout or the fame. Novoa absorbed the grit, hustle, and witness of hip-hop poetics, but not its braggadocio. While I may initially feel frustrated that this brilliant Salvadoran poet is not getting celebrated in the US world of letters as much as I wish, I feel immensely blessed that through a network of guanaco kinship and reading Salvadoran scholar and poet Janel Pineda passed along his book to me with exclamation points and told me I had to read it. Mauricio Novoa is our precious secret.

Some of Novoa’s poems are straight-up raps, imbued with skillfully wrought internal rhymes that jab your tongue into position with precision, as your lips “run from the barrel of a gun on their knees / ducking immigration until they’re stationed as far as DC.” Novoa’s meter doesn’t leave readers guessing where they’re supposed to breathe or punch a word. Other poems of his are sestinas and broken troilets, but no matter the form, Novoa’s poems are united by their rootedness. These poems are grounded by Novoa’s intimate attention to every lunchroom and bus stop in his city.

Memorias From the Beltway rifles between denunciation and refutation, taking the reader through a journey between broken dreams and undying hope. The first poem “Dandelion Graves,” which notably found inspiration in “War” by King Los, decries “pull yourself and you’ll succeed” as “the bullshit they would feed” and ultimately bemoans that “the only future that awaits is a dandelion grave.” While “Dandelion Graves” despairs in the challenges Novoa’s community faces, even in this poem, Novoa argues that “crack rock being steamed… wasn’t the home my parents made for me,” acknowledging the love and protection his parents fought to give him. Even at his lowest, when his verses detail hearses and snatched purses, Novoa always foregrounds the love and hustle that trudges people forward. While the dandelion is used in his opening poem to signify the poverty of the gravesites, just how little his peoples’ lives are valued, near the end of the collection he gives us “Dandelion Bouquet,” a poem about how the poet used to show his mother love as a child by bringing her bouquets of dandelions. Here, the dandelion is transformed, cherished for its generous “bright, pretty yellow… that seemed to grow everywhere.” Novoa notes the beauty in their resilience, penning “They shone to me even in storms that brought trees / down to earth. They came back every time they were cut / so I could always find them when they were needed.” While dandelions are besmirched by most as weeds, the poet’s mother “never [threw] them away,” teaching him to honor the love and goodness in our hoods, even when others would denigrate them. In Memorias From the Beltway, Novoa honors the McDoubles he had to split between his homeboys, the calluses on his mother’s feet, and Red Kool-Aid. Even dandelions get their shoutouts.

I return to Novoa’s work frequently because from Nipsey to Nas, he listens to the same songs we do. Because poets who are equal parts Roque Dalton and Kendrick Lamar are hard to come by. Because even though DC is more than 2000 miles from SLC, he sees me.