The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry. - book reviews

Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of fiction, poetry collections and essays, presents all three in her latest book, The Latin Deli. Some readers and reviewers might overlook the volume because of its eclecticism. (It might have escaped editorial notice in this journal, for instance, because about 60% of the volume is devoted to poetry and essays.) Others might ignore it because they incorrectly assume that its appeal is specifically "ethnic." The latter premise reminds me of a mid-Atlantic university administrator I knew whose office would not subscribe to the New York Times because "we don't care what's going on in New York." For the record, then, don't buy this book solely for the poems, solely for the stories, or solely for the essays; moreover, don't buy this book solely to read about the experiences of Puerto Rican characters in the continental US. Instead, buy this book for the profound, poignant, funny, universal and moving epiphanies between its covers.

Cofer's combination of essays and poems produces a sustained embroidery on the short stories (and vice versa). Indeed, the essays and personal poems (especially the poems "Absolution in the New Year," "Who Will Not Be Vanquished?," and "Anniversary," and the essays "Advanced Biology," "The Story of My Body," and "The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria") reveal some of the autobiographical materials that Cofer uses in her stories. Her characters include young Puerto Rican girls who, like her, grow up in Paterson, New Jersey, in or around a tenement known as "El Building." In "American History," the teenaged protagonist is so focused on her impending study "date" with the blond-haired Eugene that she is unable to respond to the other events of 22 November 1963. Her mother, offended by the daughter's failure to grieve over the Kennedy assassination, predicts that her infatuation with an Anglo boy will bring only "humiliation and pain." The prediction comes true immediately when Eugene's mother refuses to let the girl in the house. In a bitter epiphany recalling Joyce's "Araby" and "The Dead," the girl "went to my window and pressed my face to the cool glass. Looking up at the light I could see the white snow falling like a lace veil over its face. I did not look down to see it turning gray as it touched the ground below."

There are other echoes of Joyce, from the explicit allusions to Ulysses in the epistolary narrative "Letter from a Caribbean Island" to the homely character in "Nada" whose "long nose nearly touched the tip of his chin" (like Maria's in Joyce's "Clay"). On a more sustained level, Cofer's stories recall Joyce's Dubliners in their cumulative portrait of El Building's characters in different stages of maturity, from young Eva, who is baffled by the evidence of her father's marital infidelity in "By Love Betrayed," through the emotional powerhouse of "Corazon's Cafe," encapsulating two lives in the narrative frame of the hours following a young husband's sudden death. As the childless widow is surrounded in the embrace of her community, Cofer sketches that community's members with extraordinary economy and force.

Cofer's essays and poems are highly personal and as powerful as her stories. The interplay between her non-fictional commentary on the power of writing ("5:00 a.m.: Writing as Ritual") and the poems and stories that demonstrate that power constitute an implicit narrative structure tying the volume together. Several poems (among them "Saint Rose of Lima" and "Counting") evoke the power of Catholic symbol and mysticism recalled through some secular distance, yet retaining not only the power of vivid recollection but also that conferred by artistic transformation. The emotional range of the volume is impressive, from the moving posthumous reconciliation with a father in "Absolution in the New Year" (with its disarmingly witty yet powerfull coda, "There is more where this came from") to the funny adolescent pangs of "The Story of My Body" ("Wonder Woman was stacked. She had a cleavage framed by the spread wings of a golden eagle and a muscular body that has become fashionable with women only recently.")

Cofer's writing is not "about" being a Latina woman in America, nor is it "about" what critics call "marginality" or "Otherness," except to the extent that we are all marginal or Other to some degree. Who could be less "Other" in US society, for instance, than George Bush; but who has been more marginalized than he was in and since the last US presidential election? Judith Ortiz Cofer's work touches. on human concerns that speak to none Other than all of us. She is an author worth knowing.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
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