Beast Meridian
August 8, 2026 — Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Table of Contents
Review
I read this for our July Small Press Book Club, pairing it with Math for the Self-Crippling, with this book being suggested by Math’s author, Ursula Villarreal-Moura.
I often feel unqualified to evaluate poetry, and that feeling persists. Though, the visual layout decisions and the sense these give appeal to me. Perhaps more to me than to the others in my club. Poem Cardinals, A Novena enters to bracketed segments, weaving across the page before eventually resolving outside of those brackets. My favorite of the layout experiments is on page 34, which features a blank page tailed by a footnote that can only be explained as a typographic panic attack.
My two favorites are Ram, Laborer and A Field of Onions, Brown Study. I am not sure how to elaborate my fondness of Ram, Laborer. But for Onions, which is dedicated to immigrants buried in mass graves in and near Falfurrias, TX, something about the point-blankness of it works for me. It is a numbered list (affirming, maybe, a stereotype of myself, arguably a bureaucrat), noticing, stating, and analogizing. “3. At the McDonald’s, a man in a parked car will talk himself awake. This is another kind of hunger.” “27. Thesis: I swallow a bee for each ill deed one. I am a hive walking. I strain to hear you over the regret.”
I would say the book was relatively well received in the club, though this is not a group that has ever read poetry for the purposes of a group discussion. We were pretty quiet for much of the time. Funnily enough, someone asked, “Has anyone read any Cormac McCarthy? Does the title relate to Blood Meridian at all or have similar themes?” Other members must needs physically restrain me such that I didn’t lurch into a lecture on Cormac.