Year of the Dog

By Deborah Paredez

In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.

The title refers to the year 1970—the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year of her father’s deployment to Vietnam with a troop of Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation.

In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950774029

Deborah Paredez

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. Her poetry and prose explore the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. She is author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and of the poetry collection This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002). She also serves as Series Co-Editor of the CantoMundo Poetry Book Prize awarded annually to a collection by a Latinx poet. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton 2018). Paredez received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University. Her work has been shaped by her encounters with women of color, feminism, formalist poetry, diva performances, and by her experiences as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran immigrant father and a mother whose nursing skills could patch up many wounds. Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and Co-Founder and Co-Director of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latina/o poets.

Book preview

YEAR OF THE DOG

YEAR OF THE DOG

POEMS

DEBORAH PAREDEZ

A BLESSING THE BOATS SELECTION

AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, NO. 178

BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Deborah Paredez

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [e-mail].

Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon for special individual acknowledgments.

Cover Design: Sandy Knight

Cover Imagery: Photography by Gilberto Villarrcal; Despair of Hecuba by Pierre Peyron, The Met Collection Rogers Fund, 1965

Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

BOA Logo: Mirko

BOA Editions books are available electronically through BookShare, an online distributor offering Large-Print, Braille, Multimedia Audio Book, and Dyslexic formats, as well as through e-readers that feature text to speech capabilities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paredez, Deborah, 1970– author.

Title: Year of the dog : poems / Deborah Paredez.

Description: First Edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020. | Series: American poets continuum series ; no. 178 | A Blessing the Boats selection. | Summary: A Latina feminist chronicle of the Vietnam War era in documentary poems that highlights the voices of women relegated to the margins of history— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019050299 (print) | LCCN 2019050300 (ebook) | ISBN 9781950774012 (paperback) | ISBN 9781950774029 (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3566.A637 Y43 2020 (print) | LCC PS3566.A637 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050299

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050300

BOA Editions, Ltd.

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A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

For a long time Hecuba remembered

the ancient evils she had undergone

and still continued howling mournfully

through all the fields of Thrace.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses (13: 564–72), trans. Ian Johnston

… but from here on, I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening

—Adrienne Rich, A Woman Dead in Her Forties

We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about?

—June Jordan, Poem about My Rights

for my parents, Gilberto & Consuelo Villarreal

and for Julie Bathke

CONTENTS

I.

Wife’s Disaster Manual

Self-Portrait in the Year of the Dog

A Show of Hands

Lightening

Year of the Dog: Synonyms for Aperture

Self-Portrait in Flesh and Stone

Armature

Year of the Dog: After-Math

Edgewood Elegy

Hearts and Minds

Self-Portrait in One Act

Mother Tongue

Year of the Dog: A Rock and a Hard Place

Self-Portrait with Weeping Women

Helen’s About Face

Year of the Dog: Soledad

II.

Kim Phúc in the Temple of Cao Dai

Kim Phúc in the Blast

Kim Phúc in the Photograph

Kim Phúc in the Barsky Burn Unit

Kim Phúc in the Special Period

Kim Phúc in the Temple of the Sun

III.

Self-Portrait with Howling Woman

Lavinia Writing in the Sand, 1973

Memorial Day Ghazal

Last

Surname Viet Given Name Nam

Year of the Dog: Walls and Mirrors

Self-Portrait in the VA Telemetry Ward

A History of Bamboo

Hecuba on the Shores of Al-Faw, 2003

Just a Closer Walk with Thee

Year of the Dog: After-Math, Reprise

Self-Portrait in the Time of Disaster

Poem Notes

Image Notes and Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Colophon

I.

WIFE’S DISASTER MANUAL

When the forsaken city starts to burn,

after the men and children have fled,

stand still, silent