There’s a quiet, but rather insidious, quality to David Dominguez’s poetry in this collection that I really liked. I read them in the order presented in the anthology, but re-read “Empty Lot,” “Framework,” “Roof,” “Chicago Title,” “Cowboy,” and “Elwood” as a series of related vignettes. The story they tell of our speaker’s experience of building and buying a house have a day-to-day, almost ordinary, feel to them, but the details in them, and then going back to read them grouped with “Pig” and “Fingers,” changes the reading of all of his poems presented here. “Mexicali” was so different in its form and language, but fits nonetheless.

The poems say that nothing’s easy – even if you have your lecture notes, you may have your mangled cat in your car engine – but you learn to deal with whatever happens. Poor Julio, whose finger is never found after severing it in the “stuffer,” even manages to hold his good hand steady to call 9-1-1 himself. Dominguez is so matter-of-fact about a man in “Pig” who “worked out bits of meat from his eyelashes.” It’s just part of the job, but we see the difference between the factory owner Mr. Galdini, with his air conditioned office and how “his whole body/swayed with ease,” and the workers, “humpbacked under the unyielding memory of pig.” Mr. Galdini and the workers do very different jobs; they’re even shaped differently, and one gets the impression that Mr. Galdini’s “gut [is] pushed out” because he’s grown fat on all the pork sausage inside him, while his workers have the meat on the outside of them, and in “Fingers,” part of Julio is literally inside the sausage.

How do these two poems fit with the six about housebuilding? How does Dominguez go from working at the sausage factory and questioning how much physical pain you can withstand to having a house built (and the passive voice is intentional)? The speaker in “Empty Lot” says “I want our house built,” and it’s clear he’s not building it himself. Who is building it? “[T]he Mexicanos” who “don’t like [him] the moment he park[s] at the curb” and who “have names for [him]: pocho, gringo.” Clearly, he is not one of them, but wasn’t he one of them in the sausage factory? In “Framework,” he “want[s] to be the kind of man who changes/his oil and brakes in the driveway.” The word “instead” is so important in this poem. It emphasizes that he is not (or is no longer?) a “skinny [man] from Mexico.” (Is “skinny” in contrast with Mr. Galdini?) His wife rolls her eyes at his announcement that “[he’ll] install the tile” probably because the mango he has bought her is “soft, unsymmetrical, and the pulp is splotchy.” What a great image -- if he can’t even pick out a good mango, and rips his shirt just leaning on a 2x4, what will happen to her floors? We see in “Cowboy,” however, his pride in his tilework. He “is profoundly happy” and “loves that he is wearing jeans.” He can still be a “workingman.” Is he so far removed from his housebuilders?

There’s also a contrast between inside work and outside work. In “Chicago Title,” he prefers the rain “at an open window” to “the office’s fluttering fluorescent lights.” There are images of birds – a recurring theme in some of the poems we’re reading – the narrator says the crow with the French fries in “Empty Lot” owns the lot more than he and his wife do (despite our seeing them sign the papers in “Chicago Title”), and the dove is wayward in “Framework,” but her “refuge” is smashed under a boot in “Roof.” Are these the same work boots he’s wearing in “Cowboy?” The crow appears in “Mexicali,” but it is dead. Its eye cries out “All life is delicate, all life is delicate.” (The other imagery is also sharp in “Mexicali” – “ocotillo,” “spikes,” “petals of fire,” and finally, the “arched tail of the scorpion.”) Perhaps this is the message of all the poems, no matter your position or status. It fits with the last stanzas of “Elwood” when our speaker asks about the cat, “who knows what he was fearing” and “who knows how his day was going/before I smiled at the morning and started the car?” We do what we do without thinking of the possible dangers or threats, but they are there even in something familiar, even in something we may have been or done in the past.

Sheila Joseph