Publisher: at Colorado State University
ISBN: 978-1-886535-19-8
ISBN: 978-1-885635-23-5
Somatic Review of Carmen Giménez Smith’s The City She Was
Carmen Giménez Smith’s The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing)
Around eleven o’clock in the evening, take only your house keys and walk
through the city. Smell the air, feel its breath on your skin. Watch strangers,
identify a beggar. Imagine you are the beggar. Watch the buildings watching
you. Wonder what they have seen, what they know. Allow a mild paranoia to
build. Take the long way home. Walk under unkempt trees. Once home, turn
on only a strand of red mini lights, find ambient music. Take a moment to
FEEL. FEEL the city moving around you. FEEL how empty and alone you are.
Pick up the book, begin to read. As you read recall the WHISPERS from the
buildings and how the trees watched you. This book needs a background,
you are that background. Be subsumed into the poems. Remember, you ARE
the city, “…You’ll smell it in my black fur./ I’ll be the apartment ghost: pass
through walls, /through realism, but smaller, quieter,/ the tumor in the center
of your heart charka.” Pause. Take a moment to soak in the ambient music.
Let yourself become UNCOMFOTABLE. Resume reading allowing the book to
lull you into its complexity, its compassion. This book FEELS for you, “Even
for a bad zoning decision, I’ll bleed so much you’ll be bleeding,/ all of us
bleeding in and out like it’s breathing,/ or kissing and because it is righteous
and terrible and red.”
Reviewer: Aurora Smith is a first MFA in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University