This month’s must read: Now in Color

Members of the Balderrama family are featured on the cover

By our own Jacqueline Balderrama (PhD candidate, University of Utah)

Jackie’s first full-length book of poetry comes on the heels of her first chapbook, Nectar and Small (reviewed here on March 18th). My copy already has the slightly tattered look of a well-loved volume. Jackie's voice is so inviting! She engages social justice issues (race, language, family, immigration) with deep awareness and empathy and yet the book twirls with joy at every turn.  Each time I pick it up I discover something new to make me smile. 

Here's the link to purchase Now in Color

This month use code word "November" for 20% off!

The Launch

Now in Color had a glittering launch, which established Balderrama as a rising star. For one thing, the luminaries: Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s first Poet Laureate, who workshopped some of the poems in the book at ASU; Sally Ball (also at ASU), whose book Hold Sway was released last year by Barrow Street Press; and Juan Felipe Herrera, her first poetry professor (at UC Riverside), who also happens to be America’s 21st Poet Laureate.

Herrera described Now in Color as “A very warm positive embracing book that we can all pick up and step into,” Ríos lauded its commitment to legacy and heritage as well as Jackie’s recognition that “It’s never just you,” Ball quoted Shakespeare all to a loving audience that at one point numbered over 140 on the Zoom webinar. Kudos to Rebecca Olander of Perugia Press for orchestrating a lovely event.

You can watch the launch here!

Author Interview

Jackie reading from Nectar & Small

AB: I'm interested in the rich array of sources - from museum exhibits to films to interviews with your grandfather - that you list in your notes. Did they accrue randomly or according to a master plan? Speaking of notes, who’s Francisco Balderrama?

JB: The poems usually began with some kind of fragment—a story about my grandmother's maiden name for instance. Then I would perform research to fill in the gaps on the details surrounding it, like watching a Maria Montez film that my grandmother may have seen or locating sources on the training of merchant marines on Catalina Island soon after the U.S. entered WWII. I made a conscious decision to share some of those sources because in many cases, it felt important to be informative on some of the history which inspired the poems, especially events that are little known—such as the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program. Francisco Balderrama is my uncle and an emeritus professor of American History and Chicano Studies at Cal State LA who has written in depth on that subject.

AB: What's the book's story? Can you tell me about the Mabey Prize?

JB: I'd like to say it felt like a book when I defended the project at Arizona State for my MFA thesis, but it wasn't until several summers later after I made some cuts and additions, reordered, and revised heavily. At that point, reading it though felt cohesive. The poems were in a closer relationship. I submitted it to a lot of first book prizes. Let's see, I think I sent it out around twenty times beginning in 2018 or a little before. And when I got ten rejections after the first go around, I revised and sent it out again. Sometimes I got feedback or was named a finalist in a couple contests, which was encouraging. I found Perugia Press through the Poets&Writers listings of First Book Awards and was thrilled that they published emerging women writers. I thought I had submitted to them in 2018, but must not have pressed send. Worked out to send them the manuscript a year later. The Mabey Prize is awarded to UofU English Department graduate students sending out their first book in order to alleviate some of the entry fees. It's not a regular prize. Professor Paisley Rekdal created it out of some funds in the department that had lain dormant and named it after Charles Mabey, a former governor of Utah, with a private joke in mind: "Maybe there's money, maybe there isn't." Several other creative writing graduate students and myself were awarded the prize funds last year for contest fees. I’m grateful for that support.

AB: Can you tell me about your writing practice? When, where, how? With or without background sound? Waking up in the night to write down lines?

JB: I usually write on my sofa in the mornings if I can. No music, just my bird who shares the living room and sings occasionally. On my computer I keep long word docs of drafts that I'm working on with the most recent appearing first. I routinely copy and paste so each poem has multiple drafts beneath it (though I rarely go back to a later draft). I guess it's for the peace of mind in knowing I can go back. I often free write to get some ideas flowing or use some observation to start out. I have woken up at night to jot ideas down, but these rarely make it into a poem and feel quite silly the next morning. I do have a notebook. I used to be better about writing in it. I grew up writing diaries, so that was instrumental in getting me to write often. These days, I grab what's in reach if I have a phrase or image in mind—often my agenda, sometimes the notebook. I find that poems that start on physical paper usually have a better chance of making it.

AB: Then there's Alternate Ways to Paint [the midsection of the book] where poems appear two to a page. You have Pablo Picasso smack in the middle.   For me most fun is wondering "who's you?" Sometimes I thought it was PP himself, sometimes a girl in a veil. Sometimes me the reader. An elusive ephemeral you. What were you thinking?

JB: I love ekphrasis and using artwork as a starting point. I chose Picasso because these works are well known and also exhibit well known periods—Blue, Rose, Cubism, etc. They became a useful filter not only to approach some family stories but also to raise the individual, more associative experience of looking at a painting, recognizing that the viewer's way of seeing things is influenced by their past and to ask what happens if those personal stories are projected onto the art they’re seeing? I won't say exactly who's who. My sense was to get across that there are a lot of facets to a family, and the Picasso artworks helped me to explore the variety of emotions, memories, and everyday encounters within the poems. Looking at the artworks was a bit like seeing them as illustrations for things that happened before I was born or more personal experiences that weren't documented. I think of these poems as paintings hanging on a wall, sort of like a collective memory museum. 

AB: I love your reversals - esp. in fragmented apology, 2006 "or not" "or can't" With "or" these poems toy with the reader - just when the ground seems solid it melts. Did you plan that?

JB: The issues I was writing on were complex such that having a definitive claim about an experience belonging to multiple people was just impossible. The "or" helped me swivel and also be inclusive on feelings of belonging or not belonging. Other times, I employ this device to make inquiries into my own assumptions—as in "In Bed with the Lion"—in these cases emphasizing my own projections of emotion and circumstances and the possibility of other interpretations.

AB: I wonder whether at some point all your readers think you're writing about them. (I certainly did when reading Resonant Frequency and Huerta.)

JB: Interesting. I do feel like we're in a moment of collective anxiety the past few years and have been struggling with what we can do and who we want to be in the face of suffering (ours or others). I'm glad that intimacy of addressing someone close about issues concerning ourselves has come across.

AB: Most of my subscribers write fiction. They'll be interested in characters and arcs. Do you have a favorite character? Or one that best represents you (childhood Jackie)? 

JB: Growing up, I listened to a lot of stories from picture books or my older sister who had a gift to make them up on long drives. One of the children's books that sticks with me is Bread and Jam for Frances by Russel Hoban. I was never a picky eater like her, but I was very shy as a child. In the end of the story, Francis gets tired of eating the same thing for every meal and eventually tries something new. I relate a bit to that fear of trying new things and overcoming my shyness and anxiety. I also enjoy she had a sister and that her family had their dinners together which is what my family did then and still does.

AB: What's next?

JB: I'm currently working on another manuscript for my dissertation. The themes roughly circle around the environment, monstrosity, and social justice. It's been interesting to consider which approaches or curiosities from Now in Color have continued in this new project or haven't. Film continues to be an interest of mine—in this case, old Hollywood monsters that I revisit with a focus on otherness and environmentalism. Family poems too have come back in some capacity as a way of rethinking our relationship to the earth and its ecosystems. At the moment I'm working to responsibly write poems involving the experiences of the poor and people of color, those disproportionately affected by climate change.

Afterwords

Jackie and I spoke after this exchange. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her work and to ask a few more questions:

AB: What about the title?

JB: My husband came up with it. Now in Color connects with film, being a person of color, and drawing the past and present into view at once. I think it also plays with the notion that these histories, issues, and experiences are complex, blurred, and vibrant. They’re not black and white. I wrote the title poem last to sum up the themes of the book. Originally the manuscript was called “The Queen of Technicolor” after another poem in the collection.

AB: You mentioned writing responsibly about difficult topics. What does that mean to you?

JB: It’s hard to write about them. I want to contribute to the conversation without treating people as “material.” So I trace my own connection to each story. I do research to be accurate and rely on images that actually exist—such as objects, which belonged to migrants, discovered on the desert border. I also try to be very conscious of the perspective and pronouns I use in the poem. Sometimes I use second person—“you”—to avoid appropriating someone else’s experience, to make my distance clear, but also pull the reader into that experience too.

AB: What kind of bird supervises your writing?

JB: A blue parakeet named Georgia O. that took four years to tame.