The Little Devil and the Rose: Lotería Poems/El diablito y la rosa: Poemas de la lotería by Viola Canales (review)

What I value most about Viola Canales’ The Little Devil and the Rose/El diablito y la rosa is the shivers of recognition it sends through the psyche of those of us who recognize the worlds and spaces of the 54 poems inspired by lotería cards. Lotería is a bingo-like game with a deck of 54 cards that depict colorful, somewhat random images: a frog, a dandy, the moon, the sun, a harp, a flower pot, a skull, and many others. In South Texas, Canales’ childhood home, we play the game at parties, at impromptu gatherings, on lazy Sunday afternoons, on holidays. Each player has a playing board (a tabla) depicting 16 of the images and a pile of beans or bottle caps or pennies to claim the image if it’s called by the “MC,” who shuffles and picks the cards. The goal is to align four images diagonally, vertically, or horizontally on your board so you can yell out: “¡Lotería!” and win a little prize. If you are going to read this collection, start by ordering a set of lotería cards and tablas and take in the powerfully simple, brilliantly colorful image as you read the poem elicited by each card.

Canales offers no foreword on the provenance of the verses; thus, we are free to imagine the poet’s accumulation of lotería experiences where the cards ceased to be a hodge-podge of brilliant images and became, instead, representations of events recalled in calm reflection. Presented on facing pages, the Spanish version on the right and the English on the left, the poems express Canales’ deepest, most potent, and in some cases, disturbing presentations of the truth about life in the border region of South Texas. The Spanish poems place us in the rhythms and realities of life on the border; the English versions depict experiences that are transcultural, complex, and universal. Canales weaves a loose narrative of childhood wonder informed by sometimes sardonic, sometimes rueful, always starkly realistic adult retrospection. Here is the beauty of these poems: while Canales liminally evokes the collective culture, history, politics, and narrative of border life, the truths she presents trigger escalofríos of recognition that transcend culture in all-inclusive commonality.

“El diablito/The Little Devil,” the title poem, probes a childhood venture into religious normalcy. During catechism, the narrator is given a picture of Christ to color, but the box of crayons holds only blunt, broken crayons, so she uses the red crayon, the only viable crayon in her box, to color the Christ image red. The nun reprimands her for coloring Christ in the color of the devil (we have to infer this part); the narrator disingenuously describes the nun’s apoplectic response: “vi que hasta había coloreado la monja de rojo.” In the simplicity of 11 lines, this poem reveals ambiguities about faith. We wonder how deliberate was the child narrator’s choice of red to color in the Christ image; we wonder why the nun herself reddens in anger (or guilt); we consider how the devil’s name is softened by the diminutive suffix to “El diablito” in the same way that God becomes Diosito in the everyday language of border, Spanish-speaking Catholics.

The other half of the title, “La rosa/The Rose,” is one of several poems in the collection based on the popular, celebratory “Mañanitas” lyrics. This poem can be read as a tribute to a beloved woman (an abuelita, a madre, an esposa, a quinceañera), whose multi-faceted beauty and influence are symbolized by la rosa. The closing quotation from the song, “El día que tú naciste nacieron todas las flores,” is not hyper-bole but instead heart-felt truth about the radiance of womanhood that can be matched only by the majestic...