By: Aliyah Rios, Poetry Editor
In honor of National Poetry Month, I am highlighting a poetry collection by one of my favorite modern poets, Yesika Salgado, called Hermosa. This book tells stories that the Latinx community can see themselves in, giving their stories a public platform and allowing their voices to be heard.
As a person of Puerto Rican descent who was born and raised in Philadelphia, I see many reflections of myself in Salgado’s work. The love she expresses for her culture, family, and city are things that I hold dearly in my life and are a large part of my identity. Through her descriptions of her family migrating to the United States, her use of Spanish and English, and comparisons of her womanhood to her more traditional mother’s displays, Salgado’s different experiences are something that many Latinx people like myself can connect with.
Yesika Salgado is a Los Angeles native whose ethnic roots are from El Salvador. Her poetry focuses on her family, past loves, her body, and her culture to reach out to demographics that are not popular in literature. She delves into the good and bad, recognizing that within each topic, there can be elements of both.
Within Hermosa, Salgado inserts a sense of familiarity, longing, and lessons she’s learned on each page. She gives us an insight into her life by explaining what’s important to her and what helped make her into the woman that she is today. She uses the pages as a space to be vulnerable for the sake of her work being honest and real.
The opening poem in Hermosa is called “Diaspora Writes to Her New Home.” What I love about this poem is how Salgado pays tribute to her family and ancestors who have undergone many hardships and struggles, all of which led her to become the woman that she is now.
“I am what comes after the civil war/ after the dismembered corpses/ the burnt sugar cane fields/ the mango tree strung with a single hanging body/ the man with his tongue in his pocket/ the soldiers and the guerilla/ the exodus of my grandmother’s children”
Salgado takes the horrific things her family went through and puts a brighter spin on it, claiming that even though their lives were difficult, she won’t let their experiences go to waste. She will always acknowledge them with every achievement or conflict she has.
“I am not the survival/ I came after./ I am the victory/ a boastful flag.”
Another poem, “Ya Casi,” which means “almost there,” focuses on a relationship that Salgado knew she needed to leave but struggled to do. She starts the poem by describing a common moment that happens after every family gathering within Latinx families—the extended leave. It begins with letting everyone know you are leaving, but somehow the goodbyes extend to the car, conversations dragging because deep down you don’t want to go. I found this to be an interesting comparison to the romantic relationship because typically with the family events, the goodbyes take a while because they were having a great time. With the relationship, however, the reason she wants to leave him is because the relationship has turned sour. The goodbye is delayed in hopes of the good times happening again. Salgado ends the poem in reference to the romantic relationship, with “this time it is real/ finally. you are gone./ you wish your goodbye had taken longer” which shows the temptations of dragging out the goodbyes because that was how she was raised.
Salgado has published two other books called Corazon and Tesoro that follow similar themes as Hermosa.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, reading and writing was always a part of Aliyah Rios’ life. From her days of writing Austin Mahone fan-fiction and rereading all of John Green books to performing for spoken words and working with a couple literary magazines, her love for literature was embedded in everything she’s done. She is an English major with a Business minor, displays her writing skills for W.O.R.D.S’ shows while also staying in touch with her ethnic roots as a member in PRSA. After graduation, she intends to go after a career in book editing at a publishing firm.