This was clearly a weird ride, but enjoyable nonetheless. I was interested in the advertised themes (Latinidad, queer identity, grief, motherhood, feminism), and its being a novel in verse with a gorgeous cover. The book is a resurrection in verse of Mexican-American singer Selena, shot to death by her female friend and manager in 1995; the title owns its name to Selena's last, posthumously released album.

I felt a lot of potential, but the layout of this book did not really do much for me. There were some brilliant parts on female identity and the allure of celebrity in the mind of the audience, but more often than not, the book felt unnecessarily naive and clumsy. There is a cast of characters at the very beginning, in which the murderer comes first and is described as a "massive manipulator" and "possible lesbian," the mother is a domestic caretaker defined by the "smell of cloro on Sunday mornings," the bereft father is a testimony to the future as "just a story we tell," You are "the consumer and the consumed," and the author herself is a Prospero-figure assuming the identity of them all.

There were some highs (the social commentary, the almost aggressive nature of the themes of media, queerness, Latin identity), and some lows. I am not the best consumer of Rupi-Kaur-ish verses, which does not exactly describes this book, but the truth is not that far either. The poems I did enjoy, though, I enjoyed wholeheartedly (The Future is Lodged Inside of the Female, I am looking at you), and they would have worked better as set-pieces in a poetry collection, rather than a novel in verse, which I think is a very difficult genre to pull off.

After finishing this, I was curious to read more of Lozada-Oliva's standalone poetry, and oh gosh, it is oh so good. Why wasn't this novel just as good?

Here is one poem I enjoyed:
Just to Make Things Clear, I Am Not a Haunted Person
It's always my mom or my sisters who see women in gowns, standing over their beds saying their name, who, when a glass breaks or a pair of pants rips, say, "I had a dream about this," who tell me of seeing Abuelita dance with skeletons and grave-stones through our door and out the window, who feel

that there are cats sleeping underneath the porch just because of the way wind dances outside, who kiss people and just "get a certain feeling," who have a dream about their tights ripping and then the next day there's the tear, who believe that the dead aren't really dead but whistling at them from the trees, who move through their lives following the trail of salt in front of them, trusting it will take them somewhere with sun.

I've never felt leaves winking at me.
I do not carry crystals in my pockets.
I buy candles and forget to light them.
I've let an iced coffee mold over my tarot deck.
I record everything compulsively.
I want to leave everything behind.




[ARC provided via Netgalley.]