Sundress Reads: Review of A Face Out of Clay

If the past is gone, can it be said to even exist? And if the past doesn’t exist, what does that mean for history, for identity, for memory? I won’t pretend to have a definitive answer, if even there is one. Nor would, I expect, Brent Ameneyro, the author of A Face Out of Clay (University Press of Colorado, 2024). But in reading his brilliant poetry collection, I quickly realize that here is a writer who has experienced that question of identity with razor-sharp attentiveness.

The book’s first poem, “Making a Face Out of Granite,” serves as something of an epigraph in itself, hinting at Ameneyro’s poetic insight in short three lines:

“How the smallest ges-

ture can rewrite a million-

year-old narrative.” (1)

Indeed, it actually hints Ameneyro’s incisive, tactile, and portentous collection of sensory ephemera from the past throughout the book. Memories are evoked by the smallest of observations and sensations, recreating the lived experience of remembering in real time. The poem, “A Walk in Mercado de la Merced,” exemplifies this perfectly. It begins with an imperative to “inhale” and then, like the opening of floodgates, a brilliant collage of scents pours through: “fried pig skin…tortillas…cigarette smoke…violin strings / fresh paint” (Ameneyro 9). The details here are elevated from much other contemporary poetry for their eclecticism—it’s almost Nerudian, the idea of inhaling violin strings. Then, from this olfactory background, a series of four questions emerge, each one more resonant than the last for their specificity and strangeness. The first one gives the poem its undeniable power: “when did my hands get so many wrinkles?” (Ameneyro 9). “A Walk in Mercado de la Merced” no less than transmits the experience of being immersed in recalling a specific place at a specific time, and then having certain moment of details of both the present and the past snap into sharp focus, and the violent clash between past and present. Who hasn’t thought back on a favorite spot from their youth, only to be reminded of how old they’ve become?

The seeming violence—or at least, confusion—of the passage of time is also structurally represented in a series of four poems, each called “Tectonics.” According to a note in the back, a “Tectonic” originates as a paragraph prose poem which is then duplicated. Parts of one poem are cut out and erased. Whatever has been erased in one poem must remain in the other. According to Ameneyro, the poetic fragmentation is meant to reflect “The chaotic and destructive events that occur along [tectonic] plate boundaries…[which] often leave civilizations broken and disoriented” (83). This is a fitting metaphor. Tectonic movement can be instantaneous and explosive, or slow and erosive. In either case, an indelible mark can be left on the Earth, or memory. Ameneyro’s “Tectonics” are just as resonant and innovative as they sound. Take this line from the third “Tectonics”:

“it’s     easy to talk            the heart but it’s          in a

      painting             or en español          maybe it’s easier to  

talk about           the earth.” (Ameneyro 45)

The gaps in the poetry and the way the sentences are on the verge of making sense lead to thrilling suggestions.

For how fracturing and confusing time can be, moments from the recesses of memory are rendered with undeniable warmth. In “Puebla,” there are “Houses like parakeets / perched on a dirt road. / There’s an arcade / down two blocks where we used to play” (Ameneyro 42). In “Leaving Before Christmas” this warmth is juxtaposed with an emotional strife looming in the near future, one never described: “there was a keyboard / powered off / every note imaginable / played on dad’s knee / emptiness grew in the room…and there was turbulence / waiting” (Ameneyro 16–17). Every emotion is evoked and experienced with these poems, sometimes even simultaneously.

What really elevates Ameneyro’s poetry is his mastery over storytelling and surrealism. A relatively early standout in the collection is “The Overwhelming Scent of Rosemary.” It has, at its core, a simple Proustian scene. A man picks up some rosemary, crushes it in his fingers, and the scent brings forth “a memory of a house, a yard, / children playing around a rosemary bush” (27). But the poem is from a perspective of a bird who “mid-flight, / gains human-level consciousness” as it flies above the man. It can see into his mind. By the end of the poem, “the overwhelming smell / of rosemary from his fingers / makes the bird forget how to fly, / how to be bird: / it lands next to the man / and walks” (27). It reads with the simplicity and impact of a fable and it filled my heart with warmth, the way it suggests a certain kinship between the bird and the man.

The masterpiece of A Face Out of Clay, in my view, is “The Chairman.” Spanning six pages, and tells the story of the narrator’s friend and his amateur pro-wrestling alter ego, The Chairman. After many beers, he grabs a metal chair and repeatedly smashes it against his head. At first, the characters greet the stunt with enthusiasm and cheers. But with each subsequent bang against the skull, the applause diminishes; the echoes of the metal chair reach further and further, making “some unsuspecting neighbor / drop and apple / out of their grocery bag” (Ameneyro 71). By the third hit, The Chairman’s eyes are “blue and delicate / like a newborn no longer / open wide or trying / to connect with anyone” (72). The fourth and final hit follows the narrator into his dreams, and we are left with an achingly beautiful, unsettling image:

This poem is vivid, haunting, and spans countless emotions and lives. While Ameneyro writes from a specific place, with a specific identity, his poetry touches the elemental and attains the universal. A Face Out of Clay is a work of literature, quite simply, that is not to be missed. 

A Face Out of Clay is available from University Press of Colorado.

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Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge Magazine and Emerson Green Mag, and he won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize, a competition that included Guggenheim Fellows and winners of the National Jewish Book Award. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend and her cat and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.