Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: The Justice Elegies
The Mud Jar of Empathy
A review by Ben Bartu
When envisioning a chapbook, a project of epic scope is rarely what comes to mind. However, this is precisely what Jonathan Andrew Perez has conjured in the thirty-odd poems contained within his new collection, The Cartographer of Crumpled Maps: A Criminal Justice Pastoral (hereafter referred to as Cartographer). Marrying the themes, form, and style of the American Pastoral to urgent political realities, including America’s many systems of advantages, its violent institutions, and callous legal infrastructures, Perez underscores a fine wire of tension between the world as it is and the world as it is stylized to be. Resulting is a gorgeous collection at once expansive and self-cannibalizing — to read one of Perez’s poems is to read a flock of startled birds.
This image might belie the notion that Cartographer is a difficult book. In most ways, it is. The subject matter, for better or worse, is never flowery. Almost every poem invites multiple readings. In each the pastoral form is working against the political, rather than in support of it. It is a form designed to parse, and throughout Cartographer Perez succeeds in subjecting the themes he wishes to discuss to this simplifying form without ever letting them succumb to this simplicity. In Perez's poems, voices play against one another, always complicating, suspicious of easy harmony.
In the poem “Great Blue Heron: The Moon Is A Blood Moon,” we see this joining at work. Lines like “Cattail and waterlily, / emblematic of a missing feature,” & “All is buried beneath the landscape of nolo contendere,” at once pay homage to and eschew the poetic tradition they root themselves in.
Just a few pages later, a poem titled “Choose Your Own Adventure,” is dedicated to the late civil rights activist Lamar Smith whose 1955 murder “remained unsolved after 30 white witnesses did not come forward.”
Here, lavender sits on your pillow,
while scrub-grey hairstreaks munch early morning dew,
the case closed, burnt body not made anew.
Reading the ode, Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” came to mind; rather than using the language of magical realism to elegize, however, Perez has chosen the language and music of the American pastoral. The effect is devastating.
The simple and the actual are not the only ideas at work in this collection, nor are they even the only ideas which may be observed along the boundary of the American Pastoral and the American criminal justice system. A less foregrounded back-and-forth between the endemic and the manufacture, the natural and the institutional, is taking place over the course of this collection. The alarming spell of institutions is the way they can come to seem utterly natural, often in as little as a single generation. Few seem better equipped than Perez to guide us through this muddled landscape.
One of the collection’s most standout poems, “Barn Owl: Burn Barn, Burn,” begins with a definition of terms — “Barn (n.): that thing that looks like a house, but has high vaunted ceilings.” — Perez tests the limits of his Cartographer’s theory, interweaving the personal, political, and pastoral, and seeing what emerges on the other side. It is testament to Perez’s skill that the poem is made up almost entirely of couplets — as with a chapbook, one rarely enters prepared for grandiose scope. But once again, as he has with every other pastoral in Cartographer, Perez delivers.
Burn (v.): to lose and begin without I.D.
In me sits a mud jar of empathy:
For those who lived.
The opposite of fuel is entropy.
There is no justice in fourth-generations.
The opposite of hate, the sharp shrill of love,
belong a burning pledge, a folk song of death.
After his divorce, my father returned his books
to the library of lost borrowing cards.
He returned His-Panic, and took a terrible leap
across the country, from me left no history.
Perez’s debut chapbook is an important contribution. It is a work unafraid of testing the capacity of the intricate to not only live alongside the simple, but survive it. It is work where one might find a place to live.
