Bittersweet

Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s poems evoke damage and repair.

- Dan Chiasson

An unusual punctuation mark fas-tens together the title of Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second book of poems, “Lima :: Limón” (Copper Canyon). It looks like twin colons, and functions, often, like an equal sign, allowing linguistic traffi to flow back and forth between apparently opposed, though weirdly interchangeable, states—the lime and the lemon. It also calls to mind the symbol used to bridge analogies in formal logic. Analogy is relatively rare in poetry next to the usual strategies of comparison, like metaphor, simile, and juxtaposition, and yet it’s central to Scenters-Zapico’s work.

Her title comes from an old song by the Spanish singer Conchita Piquer, whose upbeat tune belies a gloomy warning: girls who do not find husbands in time, by the age of thirty or so, will become irredeemably bitter, like a bowl of citrus. Scenters-Zapico learned the song from her mother, who had learned it from her own mother. In an interview, the poet admitted to singing it to herself on occasion. Each of these women has a relationship to the song; but what is the relationship among the relationships? It’s a complex geometry that only an analogy, with its capacity to both underscore likeness and contain difference, can comprehend. To belt out that song is perhaps to heed, or perhaps to defy, its chilling message. Scenters-Zapico’s poems, which often contemplate forms of defenselessness, perform its opposite: they exert both intellectual and sexual power.