The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes

Victoria María Castells forges fierce, fresh mythology with The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes, a portrait of Cuban exile that is also an excoriation of power: “Dictators are blossoms, or tiny little robes / to put on countries and hide the bodies within.” The book opens with “Cuban young / flourishing the moon farms” amid “nostalgia of island on earth,” and closes with Fidel Castro’s “blooded ghost” at the door of an abuela with Alzheimer’s. In “Migration,” liminality presides: “Havana and Miami, /double paradise. / To have and not have at all […] hurricanes passing between.” This is a world in which “water is never innocent.”

Neither are men. “Inside every man is a little capitalist treasure,” begins “A Ruler Is Poseidon.” In “Homemaking, “children draw the body / to sleep on the ground” and “wait for the hands to grow skin […] She shall be my wife, one says, when I am older.” By the end, “Yes, the body says out from the floor, / there was murder here.”

In a version of the Bluebeard tale, a wife’s settling—for “sparse meals, / the pocked body, a friend”—condemns her: “my husband wept when he /strung me up by the ankles.” Elsewhere, a man demands his wife leave the closet, where they are sheltering during a hurricane, to make him a sandwich.

Women’s inheritances include, in “Mothers’ Warnings,” a cautionary tale of insistent great-great-great-aunts who traveled “under dark and moon” rather than sleep away from home, and paid with their lives: “Whatever you do— / never cross the sea too late.”

“Let the second wife in,” instructs the speaker in “On a Husband’s Next Family”:

Let her pre-ordered, early son arrive,
then go and do not return,
rid yourself of island hand spouse.

Let him multiply.
You are the scorching American secret,
chaste bulb, deposed ruler.

This riveting debut collection ultimately celebrates the “Mujeres cubanas” at its center:

Mujeres cubanas are the kind
to hate cousins and love
strange graveyards and
is it any wonder I burn badly
under orders:
for Cuban women,
their opinions mean so much.