The Matchstick Litanies
A Conversation with jo reyes-boitel
In high school, the house of a student a grade above me burned. Not totally, but a portion large enough to warrant sympathy, rumor, rumblings of potential financial donations. I remember thinking what it would be like for my house to go up in flames, what I’d do in the midst of watching the fire lick the paint off the walls, devour my bed, turn the tile my stepfather spent one summer installing into mounds upon mounds of ash. It was unlikely, but not impossible, and that very real hypothetical playing in my head during English class, or Algebra, made me aware of the fragility of our possessions, of the ways in which we ascribe meaning to objects and whole structures because of what comfort they provide in return.
Reading jo reyes-boitel’s The Matchstick Litanies (Next Page Press 2023) reminded me of those sentiments I experienced in high school, when I sat in class creating scenarios filled with lightning strikes, electrical short circuits, food forgotten and burning on the stove, and the fire that would inevitably follow thereafter. Here, a house fire next door serves as a catalyst for the tension that transpires throughout the collection, but what transpires are narrative, lyrical, and heartfelt meditations on family, home, identity, and how one makes sense of changing landscapes that are as beautiful as they are vulnerable.
Esteban Rodríguez: Hi jo, thank you immensely for your time. I wanted to start this interview slightly differently because when I last saw you, this past summer, you gifted me a book, Hood Criatura by féi hernandez, a fantastic collection centered on trans and queer resilience, belonging, and citizenship. You said when you handed me féi’s book that books always find their readers, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that all the books I’ve read have found their way to me. What books have journeyed to your hands? What books have you gifted others that needed that particular reader?
jo reyes-boitel: Hi Esteban! I’m so glad you liked the book. I really do believe this! Both for the anxious writer with a new book who is hoping an audience will find them, and for the reader who may not even realize how much they need to connect to another’s story to find joy or sustenance.
Your question reminded me that during the first part of the pandemic the Brooklyn Library had an online option where you could list the kinds of genres and particular authors you like and they would suggest some books for you. I’ve read a lot of contemporary poetry so I was curious and, at the results, excited for new finds! I treat every recommendation with the same kind of excitement. I tend to give anthologies to students so they can encounter multiple voices and, hopefully, end up with a favorite or two. I recently gifted Cesar L.de León’s book, Speaking with Grackles by Soapberry Trees, to a friend who writes around family. And I liked Bianca Alyssa Pérez’ book, Gemini Gospel, so much I sent it to a poet friend. I have another friend who is working on a novel in verse so I’ve got a couple of examples of that format, including Frank X. Walker’s Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers and Willie Perdomo’s The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, waiting for him. I make a point to give books away in classes. I remember when I was a young student from a working class family. Buying a new book was a rare luxury.
ER: I love that. My wife and I will leave a book in an Airbnb when we go on vacation. This past summer, we spent a few weeks in San Francisco and our hosts had a great collection of travel books. We thought we might add to their library Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa, and I see that you include Anzaldúa’s words in one of three epigraphs to the matchstick litanies (Anzaldúa’s epigraph reads: Because I have no choice.). Within the context of the collection, what does it mean to your speaker(s) to have a choice? How did you go about rendering Anzaldúa’s statement on the page?
jrb: Is it terrible I used to frequent a couple of really excellent coffee shops in the San Antonio area because they had mini libraries and I always walked out with a book?
Regarding my new book, I struggled to complete the manuscript because its focus was on my upbringing and issues of alcoholism, domestic violence, and migration. I have an incredible publisher who reminded me that readers would be empathetic and would engage with the work but wouldn’t be revisiting the memories I experienced. While working on the manuscript I also took time to deepen my study of Anzaldúa’s work. It felt like a natural choice: I’m here in the Rio Grande Valley and she is from here and her work always influenced the way I approach my writing. Her quote (and her own work) emboldened me to complete the book. Whether I did or didn’t have a choice was completely up to me, I initially thought, but as I wrote I began to understand that our stories must be told, that there is no choice in that. Speaking about where we are from, who we are, and how we live in the world can be lost in one generation. Stories are too important not to pass on. But to do so I had to acknowledge the parts of my life history that don’t sit well together, including racism between different generations of migration. I had to question what I once thought was necessary. That space is nepantla, where we sit across disparate ideas and find a new understanding.
ER: You speak about life history and how you chose to include details about “racism between different generations of migration.” I couldn’t help but reread “anthropology” and the following lines:
The land was forming a place
in this terrain between cultures—would try to choose a side
but never could. Grasslands gave way to livestock, abundant
once train tracks cut into the ground. Cows, horses,
and sheep so numerous, people living among them were ghosts.
There is a deep connection with trying to understand the history of a particular land, and how social and economic forces displace people and cultures. What sort of research did you have to do while composing this book? And how did you navigate the historical with the personal?
jrb: I had the bulk of the manuscript written but found I wanted to complicate my own understanding of what I experienced. I wanted to understand my own motivations and those of my family, to understand how trauma as youth can cement adult behavior. General research around decoloniality and reimagining futures came to play. Classic Chicanx theory work led me to scholarly texts around longing and mourning. That was especially helpful because, as colonized communities, we deal with loss historically but loss is also a willful thing, like when my father’s family altered stories to cement their survival or for their benefit. And loss can still be enacted on us in current times, as when my mother left her home as a teenager because her parents moved here to leave the dictatorship they saw beginning in Cuba. And I dove into history texts to complete the long poem “anthropology” which I wrote about Crystal City, TX, moving from indigenous communities to cattle industries to social unrest and into the present, because landscape is a factor in creating who we become.
All this to say: As I grew up I felt disconnected to my own family’s stories. On my mother’s side most family stories were near mythology. On my father’s side, the idea that they were noble and envied. Neither was true. I thought I could gain understanding through reading but learned that instead I needed to listen to their stories and ask questions about the circumstances. From there I could write about my own experiences, and question what “survival” means, what “home” means.
ER: Did your definition of home change after writing “anthropology”? Did it change after writing this collection?
jrb: I’ve always struggled with what home means to me. In many ways I inherited my mother’s exile, that rootlessness since her home country was politically and physically distant and she never felt at home in our predominantly Mexican American community. Physically we were also distant from family in southern Florida while my father’s family were just a few hours away but emotionally distant. I started this collection in 2014 and I had to put it away because addressing home (and its difficulties) was too much to work through as a primary writing project. I returned to it when, during the summer of 2021, my daughter moved to Nevada for school and I moved to el valle to complete my MFA. I needed and wanted a new sense of home - even if there was still struggle - but it meant I had to acknowledge and appreciate the home I grew up in and, by extension, to acknowledge the upbringing my parents and ancestors muddled through. I had to remind myself that home is a feeling I can create and that its trajectory, as in the “anthropology” poem, shifts and changes. Still, the idea of comfort, in a space that is welcoming and that I can retreat to, is something I am still working toward. Part of that struggle is mostly within my incredible need for community, for others who are also building new ways toward ‘home’.
ER: I love that you say “home is a feeling [you] can create,” because I too feel that we carry our conception of home within us. But since your home has shifted throughout your life, I’m sure your physical environments have provided different ways of looking at the world. How has physically changing places (whether in the past and in the recent present) affected how you write a poem? What sort of things need to click in your space to be able to bring a page to life?
jrb: I tell my students that in all the time humans have been writing there are likely a dozen or so broad subjects to write about. But what makes us return to writing again and again is that each person’s perspective about our shared experiences is unique. So, I find some comfort in knowing that no matter where I am I’ll find poets and welcoming spaces and a restaurant that makes food with my family’s lineages. More than that, I know that, like my grandfather who used to travel with one suitcase, his good shoes on and his stovetop cafetera, I can create a warm space that feels like home most anywhere. A lot of people have had cafe con leche but they haven’t had it like my grandfather used to make it for me at his small apartment while we talked endlessly about the letters he was sending home. I don’t need much beyond trusting myself in a space to let my writing go where it needs to go. And if I fall short it’s a learning process around the self, where I keep opening up to reveal more. This process reminds me of Gloria Anzaldua’s poem, “Letting Go”, where she addresses this continual process:
It’s not enough
Letting go twice, three times,
a hundred. Soon everything is
dull, unsatisfactory.
Night’s open face
interests you no longer.
And soon, again, you return
to your element and
like a fish to the air you come to the open
only between breathings.
I will say, the physical difference that’s been slower to process for me has been in navigating the world with a disability. But, even then, centering the body in my creative work has helped me deepen my writing and that connects me with others. Poetry, ultimately, is about connecting with others - I think - and giving voice to our experiences when others may have felt compelled to tolerate or remain silent. That insistence brings life into the work.
ER: If I’m not mistaken, there are over 80 instances of the word “brother” throughout the book. Obviously, there is a certain amount of fiction in poetry, but is the brother on the page your brother in real life, and if so, can you describe how your relationship with him found its way into this collection? Was there any hesitation on your end to include instances or scenarios of your past in certain poems?
jrb: This book started in a completely different way but I have been working on ways to include narrative, dialogue, and character within poetry - elements of memoir and fiction - and once I did that I realized I wasn’t telling enough of my story through first person. While my family was already in a lot of these pieces my brother ended up more present than I originally conceived. The book deals with a working class, mixed Latinx household with issues of domestic violence, addiction, and machismo. I wasn’t alone as a child growing up in that space. So my brother shows up both as a witness (whose retellings may be different from mine) and as a product of the space. Part of character development, for me, means showing as much of that person as possible. The good and the bad. The inconsistent. The shifts in understanding and place. While we both struggled, I was his older sister and witnessed how his being younger made it harder for him to verbalize what he saw while very young. And how what he saw had an indelible impact on his life. I had tremendous hesitation throughout the book process! But my including him was a way of acknowledging what he also went through. Some part of me constantly felt the weight of telling this story. It is a poetic memoir with the challenges of opening up like memoir demands but without the poetic freedom of claiming the “narrator” designation rather than linking it directly to the poet. I did this writing for myself but I also know there are those who will see themselves in this book so the work becomes a tool toward community building and acknowledgement.
ER: Was there any one poem (about your brother or otherwise) that you found challenging to write? Were there poems that didn’t make the cut for this collection?
jrb: There is a poem called “Tinderbox”, where I accuse my brother of potentially starting a fire in the house next door to my family’s home. And in “epicenter: 9”, where my mother is attempting to sneak us out late one evening but we are discovered by my father as we sit in the car. In both instances it was easier to consider the larger world around each poem’s final revelation that to focus on the event itself. In “epicenter: 9” it wasn’t yet discovered I needed glasses and I thought my nearsightedness was how everyone viewed the world so I was captivated by the light on the webbing across the windshield and could decenter the violence. I needed those ways into the poems to be able to address larger issues.
I am still writing poems about my upbringing. I know there were some poems that didn’t make it, namely the poems that felt out of place because they were centered on my Cuban family and to my connections and mythologies of those spaces. Because I grew up in Texas and the bulk of my experiences were here I wanted to let it be the center.
ER: I want to return briefly to where we began. Writing as personal as yours is a sort of time capsule to the past, and it’s an opportunity for not only readers to glimpse into your life, but for you to reflect. You’re kind enough to gift others books, and I wondering what book you would gift your younger self? Would it be the matchstick litanies, and what do you think your younger self would say about your journey?
jrb: This is a huge question! I write, in some respects, to give voice to what I could not address while I was young because there was no language in my youth for what I was witnessing. Silence was its own language. Still, if I was thinking of what books I would gift, it would be empty notebooks and lots of pens and drawing paper and paints and clay, among other creative tools. I trust the view I had of the world around me when I was young. I spent years as I got older covering those truths up. Now, I’m working to uncover it all again. I never imagined myself as an adult. I wasn’t sure I would even make it to adulthood. If I met my adult self I might find a smile on my younger self’s face.
ER: A “litany” is a form of prayer consisting of a number of repeated petitions. Can you speak a bit about the title of your collection and how “litanies” became crucial to your focus.
jrb: I was attracted to the word litany early on. This work is serious and I approached it with my own hurts but with a respect for the people I spoke about. They are and are not on these pages but I strove to gain a deep understanding - within my own limits as an unreliable witness - of what had impacted them. This felt close to spiritual. We want to be seen, you know? And really seeing someone requires a conversation. It requires silence and contemplation. I return again and again to aspects of this story, each time my understanding deepens. This was a difficult book to write but this approach of repeating and slow reveal, of small moments, helped me move within it.
ER: I want to draw our attention to the last poem, “unmasking,” and in particular the second to the last stanza:
Alone in this place, alone but woven
into the insistence of the people here, constant
as bird caws, as stars bursting, constant
as our drowsy and constant sun,
and the wind reaching for my face,
building something within
I can’t yet name.
I love these almost incantatory lines. Did you still feel alone after writing them? Do you find that poetry helps you (and writers and readers in general) move past any sense of loneliness?
jrb: This poem, and these lines in particular, serve as a breathing space. In a sense, having looked at family dynamics and my inheritance for much of the book, this poem lets me be alone after having carried others’ voices, stories, and hurts. This was a reminder to take a breath. And the quiet in being alone wasn’t just about that space but about my move to McAllen, where I’m on my own. It’s a bit of a welcome to myself. But those spaces of calm can be difficult for me to maintain. I’ve grown up reacting to problem after problem. I struggle to name that peace -to claim it - but I try to stay in it for as long as I can.
