Minneapolis, MN: Button Poetry / Exploding Pinecone Press, 2017. 43 pages. $14.00.
In peluda, Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s speaker who stands in for many women undergoes a transformation from docile daughter of immigrants to fully-fledged monster: hairy and dangerous, she peels her nails back to blood, shaves her sister’s back before prom, and stalks forests in combat boots. This collection of poems (published in late 2017 by Button Poetry and Exploding Pinecone Press) explores the fraught connections between the many aspects of a young Latina’s daily life: hair removal and language and racialized power dynamics and friendship and teeth dripping with blood. The transformation occurs slowly, lingering in girly grotesquery, until its end, when Lozada-Oliva nods at the political ramifications of being monstrous women under a Trump presidency.
Lozada-Oliva doesn’t openly address the danger of the United States’ current political moment. Instead, in a move utilized throughout the collection, Lozada-Oliva’s final poem title (“Yosra Strings Off My Mustache Two Days After the Election in a Harvard Square Bathroom”) reframes the previous monster narrative and makes explicit what’s at stake for the speaker. This is the world women like the speaker inhabit, one in which we’ve elected (as our president) a proven womanizer who believes that Latin@ immigrants are likely rapists. Scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that monsters are “born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment” which “quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy . . . giving [monsters] life and an uncanny independence.” The political rhetoric of our time is one in which political leaders have demonized woman caught at a political crossroads. With this definition in mind, we can follow Lozada-Oliva’s speaker transformation into the very monster our president and this political environment fear most: a person not easily classified, who does not conform to idealized beauty standards.
The collection opens with “Origin Regimen” which is an account of the speaker’s family’s move to the United States as well as an explanation of facial waxing. Lozada-Oliva writes:
before there were legs, bikini lines, eyebrows, upper lips,
underarms, forearms, labias, assholes, chins,
or the waxing table there were houses
& two immigrants who cleaned them. there were sinks
Immediately, Lozada-Oliva creates a fascinating meeting point of immigration, assimilation, and gender roles. By highlighting the many areas which can be potentially waxed, Lozada-Oliva foregrounds women’s bodies and the expectations placed on them early on. Furthermore, these regimens are often carried out by working-class, immigrant women who are themselves subject to harsh body-policing, often to standards that are set for white, blonde-haired women.
Throughout the collection, Lozada-Oliva puts beauty regimens under a microscope. She describes hair left on pillowcases and strangers getting bikini waxes on the family dining room table in such extreme detail that our ideas of beauty become strange and disgusting to us. This ties her work closely to the gurlesque aesthetic which seeks to reclaim the performance of and reaction to traditional femininity. However, it isn’t a simple disavowal. Lozada-Oliva also examines the multiple (sometimes positive) beauty regimens play in the lives of women: as a bond between friends and family, a way of claiming ownership of one’s own body, and as a means of sustaining families with honest, difficult labor. Indeed, Lozada-Oliva dedicates the book to beauticians everywhere whom she deems valued, necessary, and glorious.
As a part of a monster narrative, the first poem also acts as an origin story, fitting itself within an ongoing tradition of examining “how” monsters are born. At last, the speaker’s mother states, “we can see jor face now.” Facial hair has literally been cleared away to reveal the woman beneath, a line which strikes an ominous tone in its bare vulnerability. This also furthers the argument that, though this is a gendered form of oppression stemming from a patriarchy, it is also generationally reinforced by women.
The poem “We Play Would You Rather at the Galentine’s Day Party” becomes a pivot point in this transformation narrative. Lozada-Oliva’s speaker asks her friends if they would choose to live with a hairy tail in order to be “perfectly smoothie-smooth in all the right places: thighs, crotch, armpits, upper lip, neck?” This poem clues the reader into an impending change, a clear decision to embrace Other as the speaker states, “I always choose the tail.” According to Cohen, monsters disturb us most because they are hybrid bodies which refuse systemic classification—a perfectly hairless woman who also has a hairy, animate appendage, for example. The title art by Tiffany Mallery highlights this image, bright yellow like a note of caution. A woman crouches low to the ground, casting a furtive glance back at us, as if we’ve come upon her when she wasn’t expecting company. A thick tail of hair stems from her lower back and wraps around her, protectively. Discordant images like these are often repeated in the poems which fascinate, attract, and disgust us all at once.
“We Play Would You Rather at the Galentine’s Day Party” leads the reader into a structured five-part monster poem in the middle of the collection called “Wolf Girl Suite.” The poem, the chapbook’s climax, recounts the 2001 film Wolf Girl with which the speaker identifies. In the film, a young immigrant girl is afflicted with a disease which makes her “unnaturally” hairy. When Hairless Boy attempts to “fix” her problem, his medical injection causes Wolf Girl to become violent. The local townspeople try to hunt Wolf Girl down but she escapes, as monsters are wont to do (according to Cohen).
Once again, Lozada-Oliva holds off until the end to provide a context which shifts the reader’s understanding of the narrative. The last section of “Wolf Girl Suite” is subtitled “Did I Mention That the Last Name of the Actress Who Plays Wolf Girl, I Mean, Tara, Is Sanchez.” In the film, the only Latina to appear plays the role of the frightening, ugly Wolf Girl. In pointing this out, Lozada-Oliva draws attention to the racialized tension in our monster narratives. If society fears hairy monstrous women, what are we to make of Latinas, known to be the hairiest of them all? Throughout the collection, the speaker works hard to tame and trim her hair. Yet at the end of “Wolf Girl Suite,” Lozada-Oliva’s speaker, if only for a moment, embraces her monstrosity, claiming it as a form of resistance. The monster lives:
they don’t know this but she’s still in the woods
in front of a body of water
& watching her reflection ripple, so in love.
The violence of “Wolf Girl Suite” which rips into the flesh of dinner dates and claws its way out of plot holes is, at first, a shocking departure from the preceding poems. Yet, on a second and third read of the chapbook, the reader notices that the monstrous imagery has been there all along, creeping throughout the collection disguised as beauty’s pain: yowling, unhinged jaws, ripping snake skin, and red-stained lips.
If monsters demand that we “reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression,” then Lozada-Oliva’s peluda asks all that of us and then more. Lozada-Oliva explores the hybridity of and monstrosity facing beautified, racialized, feared women. That fear has real-life implications which Lozada-Oliva touches on with simplicity and grace in some of the last lines of the collection:
i think about the most womanly thing
we’ve ever done & it’s live anyway.
this isn’t oppression. this is, i got you.
i believe you. it hurts but what else are we going to do.
