Limbolandia by Esteban Rodríguez
Flower Song Press, 2023
Review by Dana Delibovi
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In Catholic theology, limbo is the edge of hell, the afterlife home of good souls who died without Catholic baptism. Once, limbo included everyone from newborn babies to the patriarch Abraham. The Church let go of limbo in 2007, describing the dogma as, to say the least, an “unduly restrictive view of salvation.” Limbo may be gone from the next life, but it pulses through this one. Esteban Rodríguez deftly captures the limbo of our existence in his seventh collection of poetry, Limbolandia.
Limbolandia reveals life’s limbo as the tense borderland between states like confusion and awakening, dissipation and rebirth, exposure and sheltering. In the book’s first section, “The Crossing,” the journey of immigrants across the México–US border is both a literal and metaphoric limbo. It is a passage through the physical frontier of nations and the psychic frontier of insecurity, hope, want, and death—as elaborated in the first poem of “The Crossing”:
So I said I am José, and the wind
turned its back, left me a scene I knew
I wouldn’t understand: buzzards, carcass,
a cactus casting shade with the burden
of metaphor…
In writing about migration, Rodríguez never allows us to gaze upon it as spectators, from a place of safe remove. He reminds us that anxiety of the immigrant ripples through all of our lives, in countless small interactions that take the measure of our empathy and compassion. Rodríguez does this in “The Crossing” by interspersing poems that describe the migrant’s trek with poems that describe an ordinary scene in detail.
For example, in the poem “London,” one of my favorites in the book, the poet rides a London bus and hears a woman speaking Mexican Spanish on her phone. Her free and easy talk on the bus in Europe is an indictment of the United States, the place of hollow toil and harsh judgment, and the poet wonders if she was…
…part of a wave that was skipping
the United States, headed to England,
Europe, because work was not an empty
promise, but a chance to clock out
for the day, ride the bus, and on the way
back home—in view of Big Ben, the Shard—
phone a relative or friend, and not care
who listened to her call.
“London” made me hurt to be an American. It made me ashamed of myself as a daily yet often unconscious witness to the way immigrants are treated here. It humbled me as the oblivious grandchild of earlier immigrants. It’s a rare poem that can batter through my ego this way, as “London did,” to the point where I admit, not just society’s wrongs, but my own.
In the second and third sections of the book, the appellative “Limbolandia” and “The Love Letters of José _____,” Rodríguez evokes the ambiguity of family, friends, partners, and familiar places—the limbo of intimacy. The poet conjures what is precarious in the people and things we know best. When seen clearly, everyday life is so strange it produces vertigo, as in the poem “Fair.”
All afternoon, you wander the park,
watch the clowns who’ve been confined
to crutches and casts drag bundles
of deflated balloons. For a moment,
as the helium seeps out, you imagine blood
flowing from the necks of every pony,
elephant, giraffe, each forming a trail
of puddles your bare feet will soon feel…
In “Fair,” Rodríguez calls forth an abysmal dread from our ordinary amusements. He does this by rendering his images in the diction of pain and fear. He names crutches, casts, necks, and blood. Things confine, deflate, and seep. Then, Rodríguez anchors such diction in two structural elements that confer an unsettled mood: halting syntax and the absence of lines end-stopped with a period.
This masterful approach to craft is one of the delights of Limbolandia. I often found myself reading a poem for the sheer joy of image and emotion, then reading it again with the question, “How did he do that?” An example is an epistolary poem from the section, “The Love Letters of José _____,” which begins, as most in the section do, with the title, “Dear____,”
…The imperfect light
swells with carvings of broken crosses
cherubs’ heads We page through Hebrew verses
antiquated and half-effaced wrought with fingers
that have feigned intimacy with generations
of coffin dust All these relics hush the night’s
heavy beds Shut the door old friend…
Subtle rhymes and visual caesuras lend gravity to the lines of this poem. These techniques, drawn from formal poetry and evoking medieval prosody, also place the poem in the stream of time. We feel a temporal limbo: the poem is written in the present tense, but is steeped in the past. Add Rodríguez’s diction—full of references to the arcane and ancient—and verses of dignity and timelessness result. When the blunt Anglo-Saxon words, “Shut the door,” arrive in the poem, they hit with a force multiplied over ages of love and loss.
Another notable aspect of this poem is its religious imagery: crosses and cherubs, Hebrew verses and relics. Rodríguez weaves this kind of imagery throughout Limbolandia, and it reaches a crescendo in the book’s final section “Requiem.” In this section, the poet opens with “Vigil,” a poem rich in images from the days of the Christian holy week (“the wound on my ribs”) and its season of spring (“forget-me-nots, orchids, rhododendrons”). “Vigil” is a poem that vibrates with love, death, and rebirth in both the spiritual and corporeal realms; religious imagery transmogrifies into human erotic imagery throughout the poem. The religious image allows Rodríguez to map the ultimate limbo-land: the place where our limited human minds try to grasp infinite mystery through the icons, stories, and paradoxes of religion.
For me, Rodríguez’s use of religious imagery is the most brilliant aspect of Limbolandia. My love for the poet’s use of this imagery is utterly personal. I spent years feeling reluctant to include images drawn from Catholicism in my writing, even though Catholic iconography, ritual, and belief had nourished my imagination since childhood. To invoke religion was to risk criticism as a sentimental, outmoded writer. But in the last few years, I have realized that to deny myself religious imagery is to block a vital creative artery. I now embrace religious images in my own poetry and also as a translator of monastic women writers. While reading Limbolandia, I felt grateful for the author’s openness to religion as metaphor and motif.
But that is not all the gratitude I have for Rodríguez’s book. I’m grateful for the book’s poetic craft and the pleasure I feel in the poems’ grace and elegance. I’m grateful for the knowledge Limbolandia imparts. Rodríguez’s book made me fully aware that closure is a chimera—that truth abides in uncertainties and ambiguities, which I must accept if I want to find peace. The limbo I feel is real, but it’s more bearable with this book in the world.
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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review
Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). He
lives with his family in south Texas.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her new book of translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, is forthcoming in Fall 2024 (Monkfish Book Publishing). Delibovi is a 2020 Best American Essays notable author, and serves as consulting poetry editor for the e-zine Cable Street. She lives in Missouri.
ID: Cover of Limbolandia by Esteban Rodríguez.
Psaltery & Lyre 