Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Peluda

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review. 

I cannot fully express how grateful I am that Button Poetry allowed me to read the ARC for this book, this kindness does not in any way influence the way I feel and will talk about Peluda and the visceral experience I had while reading it.

To understand how I felt about reading this book you need to think about it as stumbling upon someone’s journal, and as you read along you identify in this stranger’s words feelings and thoughts so achingly familiar you wonder how you were never able to put it into words. I did not live Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s life. I don’t know her, and most of the things she talks about have never happened to me, or do not affect me as a Chilean woman, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t felt the way she has felt. It doesn’t mean that the words in “Ode to Brown Girls with Bangs” don’t push me into tears thinking ‘yes, yes. This is exactly it’.

There is a certain touch of intimacy coming from every single one of her words. She is not sharing a universal story, a “one size fits all” (which is always a lie), but her personal flare makes her words feel even more “cercanas”, familiar and something, I believe, many people will relate to.

In Peluda, Lozada-Oliva talks about gender role, stereotypes, bodies, abuse, assault, and identity sin tapujos. She tells things just the way they are, no embellishments, no apologies. In “Mami Says Have You Been Crying” Lozada-Oliva writes “remember your body / the body– a land of feelings we’ve been told to cut down / we rip the things we hate / about ourselves out & hope / they grow back weaker / but hair is the only thing that grows / the way things grow in the homeland / which is why we get goosebumps when we hear Spanish at the supermarket or when a dead friend’s sweater hugs us in a dream or when a kiss is planted on the back of the neck. the hair follicles click back to life.” which sounds like the condensation of every word and poem and feeling in this beautiful, familiar book because we are peludas. Our hair is thick and dark, and the more and more you shave it, wax it, curse it into submission the more it comes back like a memory, like a sign. You can never fully change who you are and where you are from, and this experience might not be the same for you, it might not be the same for me, but we are united by this common thread that runs from my mother to your grandmother, and each one of our fathers, we are memories becoming history.

I 100% recommend this book to anyone who loves intimate tales, and poetry. Button Poetry writers never disappoint. They always have very distinctive voices and styles that manage to set them apart from a sea of voices, oftentimes chanting a similar story. I don’t know how much will change from the ARC to the final copy of this book, but from what I’ve seen, it can only get better.

 

-L.