Review: Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva
By E.R. Pulgar
Necromancy is an art we participate in every time we hear Kurt Cobain’s guitar, the emotive neo-jazz drone of Amy Winehouse’s voice, the romantic surrender of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s “Como La Flor.” It is equal parts disrespect and tribute to not let the dead rest by continuing to immortalize them in art. It’s a complicated remembrance, one that raises questions about who we are in the living world, about why we love what we love, why we sing the songs we sing, why we remember who we remember.
It’s this dark terrain that poet, performer, podcast host, and punk singer Melissa Lozada-Oliva traverses in her full-length debut collection, Dreaming of You. Conceived as a novel-in-verse, the book is hilarious, smutty, and earnest in its reflections. Lozada-Oliva, daughter of immigrants from Guatemala and Colombia, has evolved from the Latinx-identity poems that made up her first chapbook peluda. Here, the racist farce of “Latinidad” is laid bare as she lambasts the stereotypical expectation for Latinx poets to write about immigrant struggles, mangos, and grandparents in other places.
She writes about colonialism, his(panic)isms, and microaggressions with a voice dripping in deranged Twitter humor—see poem “The Future Is Lodged Inside of the Female,” where she comes for the privileged stance that white Latinxs often take when challenged on their whiteness. On cleverly titled “I’m Not A Virgin But,” she subverts the spiritual stories of the Virgin Mary’s appearances, the deification of women as love objects, and the kitsch imagery of prayer candles and icons of saints that so many Latinx kids grew up surrounded by, courtesy of the religion imposed on our parents and our ancestors. She challenges heavy subject matters jokingly and the conclusions always land, even when stanzas are punctured by “lol.”
The Brooklyn transplant from Boston has crafted a journey through the underworld guided by a Greek chorus of chismosas—gossiping older Latinx ladies, for the uninitiated. These sections, marked off in italics, guide the reader and give witty commentary as we move through the multiverse of the text. Their purpose is generously introduced by Lozada-Oliva in their first appearance:
What is a meal
without the seasoning of gossip?
What is a conversation without
a little talking-some-shit?
Her writing is refreshing, a romp through reflections on growing up Latinx in the U.S., queerness, and the nature of love and obsession, told through a new lens on the infamous murder of a beloved pop star brought back to life. The Selena reanimation plotline makes room for poems that contain conjurings, pots of period blood, ex-lovers with guns, karaoke in hell, and a showdown with the shadow self. The fantasy elements and the ensuing metaphors are more compelling than distracting, driving the plot with macabre delight.
The most moving sections, disconcertingly enough, center around Selena’s killer, Yolanda Saldívar. The president of Selena’s fan club cornered and killed the young singer in her hotel room in 1995 and has long been coded as a lesbian. Some say this assumption from Selena and her father prompted Saldívar to pull the trigger. Lozada-Oliva writes using the speculation of Yolanda’s queerness and uses it to write about her own. We see Yolanda the queer child coming into her sexuality (“Remember that Yolanda Was a Little Girl Once”), Yolanda the regretful murderer (“Yolanda Tells Me What Happened That Night”), Yolanda the fugitive who escapes prison by ripping the skin off a cop’s face à la Hannibal Lecter (“Yolanda Saldivar Gets Away With It”). The humanization of Yolanda and her use as a dark-light mirror for Selena (with Lozada-Oliva inserting herself into the work in a turn of autofiction, fighting her own shadow) is complicated through these humanizations. It’s a daunting task, one that Lozada-Oliva handles with the care it merits.
Dreaming of You, for all the bululú it’s sure to cause, should be celebrated as an expansive experimental work that plays with a wide variety of poetic forms and voices. Outside of the novel-in-verse framework that shapes the majority of the collection, Lozada-Oliva flexes her pen on sonnets (“Crush Sonnets,” perhaps a subtle nod to Karen O’s Crush Songs), list poems (“I Made You A Playlist to Get the Real You Back Even Though Real You Doesn’t Listen to the Lyrics,” which makes a bold comparison between Mexican ranchera and country music), pseudo-film scripts (“A Star Is Born Again,” which details the world reacting to Selena’s resurrection), and column poems that can be read three ways (“You and Me Don’t Talk Anymore” and “Yolanda and Selena Don’t Talk Anymore,” two incredibly heartfelt reflections on desire).
Lozada-Oliva, channeling contemporary poet-astrologer sage Ariana Reines (whom she quotes as an epigraph to the opening section) questions the very “You” of poetry throughout the book, making You an ex-lover. “You” is eventually transformed into a fish monster (fans of The Shape of Water, eat your heart out) in “Poem For Fucking A Fish.” Risks like these—the funny and weird and tender bits—make Dreaming of You striking. It is as much a totem of her twenties in Brooklyn as it is an ode to Selena. Lozada-Oliva calls herself back from the dead, reflects, integrates, moves on—in doing so, it forces us to do the same.
About the author:
E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, translator, and critic based in Harlem. Their criticism has appeared in i-D, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and elsewhere. Their poems have appeared in PANK Magazine and b l u s h. They are an MFA candidate in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, and serve as the Online Poetry Editor of the Columbia Journal. Born in Caracas and raised in Miami, they live in New York City.
