Portraits as Animal: Poems
Portraits as Animal is a gallery of self-becoming in a "sunbaked house as tiny as a heart." With a toothy lyricism at turns sly and forthright, Cárdenas's hunger to belong carries us from a stove "bleeding a hundred kinds of caldo" to his "determined mitochondrial ancestors''-a journey framed by generational struggles with addiction, a queerphobic church, and the always-transforming land.
In conversation with Taos's rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that "to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me." Here is pain and violence, but here, too, is the assurance that we are "built for this metamorphosis" and can follow our past incarnations "over scorched earth neon with new grass" to a future of our own making.
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In poems both beautiful and feral, Victoriano Cárdenas' Portrait As Animals delivers a visceral punch to the gut. Cárdenas reveals that there is no need to dig into the depths of the human soul for the violence and savagery that lives right at the surface. Instead, the work is to find the tenderness and vulnerability hidden inside. The work is to become poet and human and man, to sand and polish and stain, to name and highlight our unique intricacies, to in the end, finally declare, "Now I am redone." -ire'ne lara silva, Author of Cuicacalli/House of Song and Hibiscus Tacos
Sewn together with the fluid thread of the acequias of Northern New Mexico, these poems trace the complicated-yet-life-giving connections between origin and inheritance. Cárdenas turns always to the well of possibilities inherent in choosing to love the world as he finds it, messy and rusted as it can sometimes be. Portraits as Animal is a wild menagerie of desire and loyalty, anxiety and joy, an animal cursed with awareness but gifted with the mouth that can sing us these songs. -Trevor Ketner, author of [WHITE] and 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow
