Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's Incantation is a cultural and personal history. A dazzling and provocative second collection that entices readers with its playfulness in language and spirit as it moves from internal to external concerns about fear and chaos. At times reflective in poems like "Battlegrounds," "The Way Men Use Me," or "Comfort Food for White Spaces." Each section engages with a mix of conventional and unconventional diction and syntax that is melodic and mesmerizing, including concrete poems that dance playfully across the page in shapes and forms like couplets, prose poetry, and tercets. There are moments of resilience urging readers to confront injustices and strive for a better world. These poems will entice you to return, leaving you with "something to savor" every time.
Ruben Quesada, editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, author of Revelations
Bermejo's poems are sensuous, sensual offerings for a tender self that rails against the ragged world. Each is a container crafted to hold the raw yearnings of a body that lives and witnesses state violences against BIPOC, female, and undocumented bodies. Incantation do more than conjure hope for a vague future, they demand accountability and enact the healing we need now.
Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
Incantation marks the resting place of the dead and slaughtered, but also celebrates the living and clairvoyant. Combining elements of identity, place, research, and home, Bermejo disrupts our dismissal of political poetry; she enlivens language to challenge our complacency and expose our ennui to coax us all to hold on to one another for dear life.
Monica Prince, author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem
In Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites the living and the dead face each other: sometimes in dreams, sometimes in bodies, sometimes in peace, sometimes in tension. With one eye to life and the other to whatever comes after, Bermejo crafts a language that is incantatory and immediate. Musical, urgent, affectionate and unafraid, these poems believe in living, but also believe that the living have things to learn from the dead.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios.
In Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's beautiful book Incantation, the personal is always political. While navigating white spaces and ghosts on the battlefield among the monuments, the speaker encounters racism, misogyny, and state violence. Read this book for transformative songs of Los Angeles, borderlands, and sites of war. Incantations believes inexorably in freedom, in community, family, and love--and the ability for words to not only name that which maims us, but also, that which restores us.
Cathy Linh Che, author of Split
