Review: Dani Putney
On Dela Torre by Dani Putney
by Tyler Truman Julian
Dani Putney’s newest chapbook, Dela Torre, defies the limitations of its length. Embracing the sensitivities of a postcolonial lens and confessional and narrative forms, the poems of this chapbook cross oceans and time to shape a global and familial history that is at once arresting and compelling. The poem’s elevated sense of detail causes both reflective pause and a breathless race toward the end, as the reader grapples with the legacy of empire and craves closure and wholeness in the speaker’s fractured existence.
When engaging with postcolonial texts, it’s necessary to reflect on the body, and throughout Dela Torre, Putney’s speaker wrestles with identity. Their attention to detail consistently points back to their body and how their familial history impacts it. In “Los pioneros,” the speaker asks, “La atmósfera está infectada, / ¿la ves? El pasado / no nos dice nada—” Do we see the infected air? And with this question, the speaker seems to say, The past can’t tell us anything. It just infects. What does this mean for the postcolonial body? What does this mean for the speaker? What does this mean for the reader? These questions drive the reader forward and deeper into the chapbook. In “Kimchi,” the speaker synthesizes the “nervous conditions” of the colonized body (transferred through the generations) into a clear, descriptive narrative for anyone willing to attempt to understand:
Nothing gives me more hope
than spicy cabbage—
…
my Filipina mother didn’t eat
ramen growing up, or like
kimchi, but my picture of Asia
was painted in America—
…
I’m my most Filipinx version
of myself with white friends
in a Japanese-style ramen shop—
Filipinx, not Filipino,
not because of my non-binary
identity but because x marks me
as Anglo, barely yellow—
and the truth—I don’t become
anything by eating kimchi,
no metamorphosis,
my face still a question—
In postcolonial studies, the body is a text, a space in which conflicting discourses can be explored and imperial power can be rejected or reinforced. And this is the work that happens in “Kimchi” and the poems throughout Dela Torre. Putney’s speaker navigates identity, subjectivity, and ultimately, American-ness shrewdly, with clear cut usage of contemporary cultural references, language, ideas to assert individualism and a nuanced poetic style. They tell us, “I’m not the first to say life is / a perception of reality. Our bodies / exist because we make them” (“Pauli Excursion”). Just by existing and asserting their identity Putney’s speaker is creating a new reality and responding to history. “I was born,” the speaker explains in “Dela Torre,” “with Ma’s blaze along my tongue, // her plea to never forget our past: / colonization in two languages.”
Dela Torre’s attention to detail offers a ready corrective to the abstract ideas it is so tempting to apply to conversations about race, colonialism, and American empire. Putney’s speaker places these conversations into a living context, fraught with familial and historical tension. Dela Torre is a powerful chapbook and its wealth extends well beyond its short length, to where it enters, intersects and complicates the narratives so firmly rooted in America’s sense of self that they have become sacrosanct.