banana [ ]

The first poem in Paul Hlava Ceballos’ collection, banana [ ] rebegins a world: “The first day in the garden, God was/ an immigrant who planted gulls/ in clouds.” The poems that follow unfold multiple individual and shared stories, plucked and grafted from the poet’s lived experience and a variety of oral and textual sources, that reveals the landscapes Ceballos moves through to be one, interconnected ecosystem.

Multiple elegies are dedicated to the murdered victims of police officers, Border Patrols agents, and ICE in the U.S. The heart of the collection, “Banana [ ]: A history of the Americas,” a 39-page poem woven of sentences and fragments of found sources that include the word “banana,” incorporates the violent murders of banana workers by guerillas and private security agents and paramilitaries in banana-producing Latin American countries. 

The lines in these poems move like vines that split, cover, and smother the architecture of the plantation. Ceballos again and again turns to the rootworks, the webs of interconnection that life depends upon, that refuse to not flourish, even within the strangling systems and structures of monoculture. In banana [ ], the elegies are as vibrant and vital and complex as the poems that speak to and provide portraits of the living.

Stories, languages, voices, like roots, can break and crumble the foundations of the oldest and strongest of houses. They can make breadcrumbs fall from clouds like snow, white cotton veils bridge one country to another, the dead glow inside a screen inside a hand. The worlds Ceballos is writing of and from and the worlds he is writing into being, hold the impossible contradictions of living in a world he is not meant to survive.

“She belonged here 
when she spoke, and she spoke 
history into being, a country separate from harm.” 

“I aimed my blade at you because 
skin is where the skin grows hardest.”