Relinquenda

In only a few short years, Salvadoran American poet Alexandra Lytton Regalado lost her father, found herself involuntarily separated from her husband for nearly three months during the COVID-19 lockdown, and then lost her mother, as well. In Relinquenda (meaning, “which is to be abandoned, which is to be relinquished”), Regalado’s elegiac poems unspool knots of competing emotions prompted by so much loss: grief, regret, anger, sadness, relief. As the speaker of one poem says: “I try to fashion a heart from my tangle of guts.” An ailing father occupies much of the book’s concerns, even as the speaker’s relationship with him is defined by a sense of detachment:

How to lean into this distance? Would it be enough to fill in
    all those blanks, those
             things unsaid, perhaps even, unfelt? That was the
    terror—
how my father would respond. It is clockwork, this moment,
    & it is expected I give my
             solemn & sincere goodbye. […]

Regalado often favors long lines and poems, maximalist explorations of complex feelings that allow the speaker to verbalize so many running thoughts. Readers who prefer every syllable measured and every single lyric to sing may grow impatient, but Regalado rewards the effort with bold moments that strike like a punch to the gut or a stone in the pit of the stomach:

He’s    unraveling    while I’m still     knitting us,     the cloth
    pulled &
             snagged,         letting in         light. I undo             my
    mistakes,        trace
             back to the first stitch.

Ultimately, the speaker is forced to reckon with her own mortality, how it will impact her children, how she carries forward or refutes the legacies of those recently deceased:

I sense the shipwreck, my human body
sloughed off, cast away, sunbleached
& bonewhite driftwood on a beach
where my children will gather around
the wreckage as it singes & cracks,
into wind, ashes, everything I returned to,
clung to, there & there & there,
painting their faces, their empty hands,
there, there.