Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry by Jasminne Méndez (review)

This second book from Jasminne Méndez, Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry, is, at its core, a book about the limits and graces of understanding. As the essays chronicle the narrative of the author's struggles with health issues, such as scleroderma and lupus, the accompanying poems invite the reader into the energy and emotion of dealing with chronic health issues. Two questions I returned to often while reading the book were: How much do you need to know to understand an experience that is not your own and where does your own experience limit your understanding of the text? As a reader, I loved this book and devoured it in just two days. To do it justice in a review is a bit tricky though. There is an eye I bring with me when reviewing. It's an eye developed in workshop after workshop, lit class after lit class. It's an eye that says, "What is this and where does it fit?" It says, "How can I prove that what I think and feel are valid?" This book deserves more of the reader's attention than that eye will allow.

As the child of Dominican immigrants, Méndez stood out at her Texas high school as "the black girl who spoke Spanish." As she relates her experiences, she must walk the line between not enough and too much information, that line between confusing the reader and talking down to them. Throughout the collection she consistently hits it just right. Her essays incorporate many Spanish phrases and she helps provide clarification for non-Spanish speaking readers, such as myself, while not slowing down the narrative for those who needed no help comprehending sentences such as "¿De verdad?" and "qué vamos a hacer contigo."

The same is true for how she details her interactions with medical professionals. She must make them understand that even though they might think she is "too pretty to be this sick" or "too young to have all these health problems," she deserves their care and attention. For the reader, she must bring us into her frustration, both those who enter it easily because of our own experiences with the medical community and those who have always been lucky enough to have patient and sensitive doctors and nurses. As she works to make herself understood to those around her, we as readers grow to know her better, becoming attached to this vulnerable, strong, and sometimes a little snarky woman, who we may look up on Twitter after we finish the book just to make sure she's doing okay.

This collection is at its best in an essay that may blur the distinction between poetry and prose, "Hands: El Corte," which received an honorable mention for the Barry Lopez Creative Non-Fiction prize from Cutthroat in 2016. The essay weaves back and forth between descriptions of Trujillo's 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic (known in English as The Parsley Massacre, in Spanish as el corte, and in Haitian Creole as kout kouto-a) and Méndez's decision to have an infected fingertip amputated. The essay deftly tackles the complex topics of personal and cultural trauma while offering up beautiful insights, such as "We all live in the quiet spaces that exist between acceptance and denial." Throughout the collection, and in this essay in particular, Méndez meditates on what it means to be the child of Dominican immigrants and a Texan, as well as how these experiences shape her understanding of her own body and illness. When the reader reaches the final line of the essay, we feel its weight not only as a piece of her personal narrative, but also as a cultural commentary: "A new ulcer has begun to form on the fourth digit of my right hand and it's refusing to heal. I'm not as eager to start cutting this time."

The poems in...