“Caught up in a tradition of gaming our “othering,” a thoughtless strategizing “away,” we dismiss the nuance…”

​Gimenez wrestles with the inter-sectional identities which themselves contend: they demand her internal attention, threaten to unbalance, all while simultaneously being subsumed under these same identities defining her from without. What results is a compelling, vulnerable, and finally insistent collection that cannot know what comes next: but what we can do/be is recorder, the resistance to forgetting, to oversight, to rationalization.

Gimenez is no lightweight in understanding the demand: our language, our politics, our ideologies, our own psychological subversions ever seek to rewrite the world back to “normalcy” of a status quo. Caught up in a tradition of gaming our “othering,” a thoughtless strategizing “away,” we dismiss the nuance and struggles of those we meet.

And what do we miss? The joys and challenges of parenting, of adapting, of laughing, of wondering.

Not many poems in this collection stand singly as superior to another; in fact, they might/should be read collectively across the book; the kind of embrace that no more witness could ever offer.