YOU by Rosa Alcalá

Rosa Alcalá’s YOU, her fourth poetry collection, examines how language shapes memory and identity. Moving between English and Spanish, the poems explore themes such as migration, motherhood, gender, and cultural heritage. Alcalá confronts the fractures of belonging and the silences imposed by history, using sharp, precise verse to reveal both the power and the limits of expression. YOU is a bold reckoning with what it means to live between languages.

Rosa Alcalá’s Fourth Book: A Bold Exploration of Language, Memory, and Identity

In YOU, Rosa Alcalá delivers a fearless and formally inventive collection that redefines the boundaries of contemporary poetry. These prose poems pulse with urgency, weaving together the intimate and the political, the remembered and the inherited. With razor-sharp wit and linguistic precision, Alcalá dissects the fragile architectures of memory, identity, and familial legacy. Her imagery is both arresting and tender, capturing the dissonance of bilingual life, the unspoken tensions of motherhood, and the residue of intergenerational trauma. YOU is not simply a collection of poems—it’s a bold reckoning with the ways language can both confine and liberate.

---

While Your Fathers Did Second Shifts

In this striking poem, Rosa Alcalá braids humor, resistance, and generational critique into a vivid coming-of-age narrative. The speaker recounts the quiet rebellions of girlhood under the watchful eyes of patriarchs who fled authoritarian rule, only to replicate it within their households. Freedom, for these daughters, lives in the margins: in rearview mirrors, kohl-lined eyes, and stolen moments in the dark.

“You shared with your cousins one eyeliner pencil, applying in rearview mirrors the blackest breves to lower lids.”

This simple act becomes a portal to identity, autonomy, and the very fears these Spanish fathers tried to guard against. Alcalá’s language crackles with movement: hormone-fueled escapes into basement parties, cross-cultural flirtations, and maternal interventions that cannot quell transformation. The speaker’s defiance is not loud but persistent, irrepressible.

“Because your fathers fled a dictatorship only to set up their own...”

Here, Alcalá captures a deeply ironic inheritance—the migration away from oppression giving rise to new forms of control. Yet within that legacy, the poem carves out a path toward freedom. The final lines swell with both tenderness and subversion, honoring the speaker’s emergence despite the systems meant to contain her. It’s a brilliant exploration of how tradition and identity collide—and how, through ritual, resistance, and even conjunctivitis treated with té de manzanilla, a girl becomes a woman in command of her own story.

---

Not, “What Can You Remember?”

In Not, “What Can You Remember?”, Rosa Alcalá dismantles the tidy nostalgia often associated with memory and poetic reflection, instead confronting its fractured, embodied reality. Blending confessional narrative with cultural critique, the poem begins in a landscape that evokes the lyrical calm of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson—only to unearth the dissonance lurking beneath.

What begins as a seemingly intimate evening at the Paterson Falls—a boyfriend, a cigarette, the “wrap skirt” and “braless phase” of youth—spirals into a chilling meditation on gendered fear, post-assault trauma, and the unreliability of both instinct and narrative. Alcalá masterfully juxtaposes the romanticized masculine ritual (“the stranger curled his body over it and cupped the flame”) with the stark horror of what follows: a violation so profoundly embedded in the speaker’s memory that it defies neat retelling. The speaker’s desire “to seem cool, tough, unafraid” becomes a haunting refrain against the reality of violence endured.

This poem does not offer catharsis. Instead, it interrogates how women are taught to downplay danger, to stitch together what is broken with plausible deniability (“You blamed it on volleyball”). Alcalá even calls out the poetic ideal itself—Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”—with bitter irony. In a world where male poets get to amble thoughtfully while women are surveilled, threatened, or erased, Alcalá asks: who has the luxury of recollection?

The poem’s final image—a mother quietly mending a Gap shirt torn in violence—underscores the generational burden of silence and the need for repair. With its emotional velocity, layered perspectives, and razor-sharp cultural insight, Not, “What Can You Remember?” becomes a reclamation of narrative power.

---

This Little Catalog You’ve Been Assembling

In This Little Catalog You’ve Been Assembling, Rosa Alcalá threads a darkly witty meditation on the absurdities of modern life through the lens of climate anxiety, gender politics, and personal vulnerability. What begins as a casual reflection on a heatwave photograph in The New York Times becomes a kaleidoscopic commentary on global catastrophe and private indignities, brilliantly collapsing the divide between the personal and the planetary.

Alcalá anchors the poem in vivid, almost cinematic imagery—a red plastic cup rolling past bikini-clad sunbathers at the Trocadéro Gardens, the Eiffel Tower looming in the background. Amid the escalating climate emergency (“chicken manure spontaneously ignites on a farm in Spain and sparks a wildfire!”), the speaker’s inner monologue veers toward the absurd and the intimate: body image, an unwanted elevator kiss, the humiliation of catcalls on the subway. The result is a restless oscillation between the small violences women endure daily and the existential threat of ecological collapse.

The poem’s brilliance lies in its emotional layering. Personal grievances are not minimized—they are reframed as inseparable from the backdrop of collective crisis. Alcalá questions the validity of the “catalog” she’s been mentally keeping, wondering aloud whether such grievances even matter in a world where “the autobahn can buckle and send your Volkswagen surfing.” But instead of flattening the speaker’s voice, this juxtaposition expands it: the absurdity of shouting “Greenland and Alaska are melting!” in response to misogyny becomes a potent, poetic protest.

Alcalá’s closing image—the stranger in the elevator proposing a game of cards, only to be told that “this elevator and everyone in it are going straight down”—is devastating in its finality. It captures the poem’s underlying dread: that we are all trapped in systems we cannot escape, laughing nervously on the descent.

By threading personal anecdote through planetary panic, Alcalá crafts a work that is both satirical and searing—an urgent, unflinching commentary on the quiet terror of being alive right now.

---

A Collection of Daring Precision

YOU is an unflinching, formally daring meditation on the collision between personal memory and collective experience. With razor-sharp prose poems, Rosa Alcalá probes the emotional landscapes of trauma, identity, and cultural inheritance, all while wielding a voice that is at once incisive, irreverent, and deeply humane. What elevates this collection is Alcalá’s precision—her ability to excavate meaning from the smallest gestures, the quietest humiliations, the most fleeting recollections.

This is poetry that resists sentimentality and instead insists on honesty. Alcalá bridges the intimate and the political without ever sacrificing nuance, exposing how language itself can both wound and liberate. YOU does not simply invite reflection—it demands it. In doing so, it cements Rosa Alcalá’s place as one of the most vital poetic voices of our time.

---

About the Author

Rosa Alcalá is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry, including her most recent collection, MyOTHER TONGUE. Her work, celebrated for its depth, precision, and exploration of identity, has been featured in prestigious publications such as Harper’s, The Nation, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, among others. In addition to her original poetry, Alcalá is a renowned translator, bringing the voices of Spanish-language poets into the English-speaking literary world with care and nuance. She currently serves as the De Wetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches in the Bilingual MFA in Creative Writing Program.

For more about Rosa Alcalá, explore her profile in the For The Writers Directory of Writers and Poets: Rosa Alcalá: A Poetic Voice of Power, Precision, and Cultural Reflection.