Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez (review)

In his debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez plays the role of world builder, crafting a Chicago that is equal parts familiar and fantastic. Olivarez has long served as an important contributor to the Chicago poetry scene through his role as teaching artist and marketing manager of Young Chicago Authors, a nonprofit that organizes a number of writing showcases, workshops, and the country’s largest youth poetry slam, Louder Than A Bomb. Following in the vein of Eve L. Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Kevin Coval, these poems shift seamlessly between love letter and rebuke to the city. This is the Chicago of corner store cheese fries, indoor shopping malls, and ’90s Bulls legends as well as shuttered steel mills, ice raids, and creeping gentrification.

Olivarez summarizes his vision of his home in the poem “Ode to Scottie Pippen”:

underneath my heart, i carrya moldy factory manufacturing sky

The factory is the heart of the book’s world, serving as the intersection where narratives of family, culture, self-perception, and responsibility meet. Olivarez’s intergenerational tale, which begins when his parents cross the border into the United States, details his struggle to craft his identity when his body must “contain two countries” and “the countries go to war & it’s hard to remember you are loved by both / sides or any sides.” This liminal reality creates the book’s binary of citizen and illegal. What must a person give up to achieve the “million-dollar job,” the “new house, bigger garden” in America? As Olivarez notes in “I Tried to Be a Good Mexican Son,” as his Spanish deteriorates, his English grows more vulgar. Once a symbol of opportunity, the closed steel mill where his father worked becomes a darkness that lingers above Olivarez’s poems. After all, what is America but another broken promise?

Within this space of suspended progression, Olivarez creates forward momentum by stepping backward, retracing the narrative in order to revise it. Many of the collection’s poems begin where the action ends—a father with belt in hand, a mother putting on makeup on the day of her fiftieth birthday—and retreats into the more fruitful areas of memory and imagination. If the leather of that belt a father uses to hit his son could once again become the skin of a cow, Olivarez imagines in “Boy & The Belt,” its purpose would again be to protect rather than bruise. The poem “On My Mom’s 50th Birthday” reads as a family tale told in reverse, as the speaker removes his mother from the house and frees her from her role as a wife and caretaker so that she can once again have her life exist fully ahead of her:

i am unbraiding our dna, unknotting our lives,

so for the next few hours she will not worryabout me & my brothers, so for the next few hoursall she will have to worry about is the color of her lipsand the handsome men admiring them.

Citizen Illegal itself is a knot, weaved together tightly by the threads of potential and disappointment, pursuit and regret. By unbraiding the dna that makes up him and his family, the “i” reshapes his identity. If the promises we’ve built our lives upon—home, upward mobility, “The American Dream”—have all failed, then the answer Olivarez finds is not to surrender, assimilate, or find new promises to believe in, but to revise these narratives. Entering into memory and the fantastic, the poems create new spaces for a world in which promises can be fulfilled. In “Poem to Take the Belt Out of My Dad’s Hands,” the boy reasserts his agency and removes the potential for abuse by burying the belt, creating a new story of “my dad. me. still under / his hands. still crying.” With the weapon erased, the relationship between father and son is no longer one of power but tenderness. Ultimately, Olivarez does not seek to rewrite or return to the past but to identify those who have been silenced and reintroduce himself and his...