Charlie Vázquez’s bilingual (English/Spanish) poetry collection, Meditations/Meditaciones – Bronx/Salsa is an impressive one for its varied subject matter rooted in three basic themes: place, identity and the senses that tie us there.

The place is the Bronx but also places left behind and returned to as outsider like Puerto Rico. The identity Vázquez invokes in his poems is that of a son – not just to a father he is estranged from but also the son of multiple islands from which he is also estranged. The senses are physical ones. with poems like The Dance of Life, invoking Taino ancestry and spelling – we hear the origins and evolution of history through Rican/Cuban music and those who made it and move to it. Some of the characters are real living beings. Others are spirits.

The theme of sound and motion permeates the vast collection.
I was really struck by the number of pieces in the collection and the accompanying album list that included classics of salsa. Before I began delving into the poems I wondered if I should use the album list as a sort of soundtrack by which to read the collection. I opted not to after finding it difficult to sense the rhythm of each individual poem when it was competing with Celia Cruz or another salsa great.

The longer poems, which act as word landscapes for a Bronx that no longer exists with a soundtrack that is now elusive in the era of reggaeton, are punctuated by shorter, almost stream of consciousness untitled snapshots of feelings and slices of life, sometimes in a voice that seems almost childlike in struggling to understand.

La Policia
Con Papi en su carro
Mami llorando

As someone who has translated her own poetry from English to Spanish and back, and as someone who has translated Spanish language poems into English for Latin American poets, I found myself wondering if the poems that were bilingual were written in English or Spanish first. Looking at the poems side by side, I tended to favor the English language ones in terms of vocabulary, rhythm and flow.

Overall, Charlie Vázquez’s Meditations/Meditaciones – Bronx/Salsa is a welcome addition to the growing voices of Nuyorican (in Charlie’s case- NuyoCubaRican) who share their painful nostalgia for what used to be our identity and the hope of what it can grow into now and in the future.

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