El Rey of Gold Teeth by Reyes Ramirez is a striking contribution to the poetry of the Central American diaspora.  Ramirez writes in a form-forward style with a microscopic attention to language.  His pen treks across an ambitious range of topics, including toxic masculinity, the climate crisis, as well as colonization and its hangovers.  There is hardly a poem in this collection that doesn’t fit into his tightly woven thematic tapestry and the following four series: the “hijo please series,” where his mother provides him with sometimes toxic but always loving advice and admonitions; the “A Lesson …” series, where Ramirez unpacks the weight of colonization, migration, and (dis)possession, especially in gendered terms; “The Fabulous Wondrous Outfits of the Fabulous Wonder Twins” series, where Ramirez takes images of twinning from 80s and 90s music videos and spins them out to comment on the bifurcation of identity so frequently discussed by diasporic authors; and finally the “… is My America” series, where Ramirez takes moments of both joy and disaster to paint us the cultural landscape of his personal America.  Such a tight grip on his pen gave me little space to doubt Ramirez’ intention, sequencing, or mastery of form, even when I may have wrestled against them.

Take, for example, Ramirez’ use of codeswitching.  The poet intentionally codeswitches in a staggering manner that pushes against the fluency of typical bilingualism.  This excerpt from “A Broken red-eared Slider’s Shell” is case in point: 

house de flesh y hueso

glides about un azure womb

skyed con marbled

membrane struck numb

por prisms que shatter

y skitter.

The average bilingual reader will recognize that this is not how we generally codeswitch and likely will have difficulty saying this sentence aloud.  For some, that will be a turn-off and valid criticism.  It’s obvious to me at least that this move is intentional.  The clash of languages in between articles and prepositions forces me to slow down to pronounce the language Ramirez conjures, which is beautiful even if I experience some pain in the difficulty of speaking it.  Rather than flip the page in frustration, I marvel: what a clever way to corner his readers and force them to slow down and experience the violence of language.  The trip of the tongue is a trip I experienced many times in my lifetime of losing and acquiring my Spanish.

El Rey of Gold Teeth will routinely dazzle you with flashes of perfectly sketched moments and images Ramirez uses to transport people directly into his neighborhoods.  In “La Pulga,” you will rummage through “a series of shirts,” where “Tweety is Chicana / Bart Simpson is Domincan” and “Vegeta is Salvadoreño now.”  In “Finding Kittens After a Tropical Storm is My America,” Ramirez surveys his devastated city in an effortless contrapuntal, showing the reader “edgeless mouths struggling to speak” and how “raw pink paws thrash again / for nipples on rusted air conditioner.”  In “A 4th Grade Dance Party in a Cafeteria at 1 P.M. is My America,” Ramirez shares the magic of watching children spontaneously dance “the milly rock, / the juju, running man. even ones before / their birth like the macarena, wobble, cha cha slide.” Ramirez displays such charm and mastery time and time again in poems about pupusas, pozole, Selena, and more.

Ramirez writes from Houston, Texas, a city bursting at the seams with powerful Black and Latinx voices in a state that has banned more books than any other state as of 2023 and where diversity, equity, and inclusion has been outlawed in higher education.  In El Rey of Gold Teeth, Ramirez follows the thread that stitches his Latinx communities, their significant leaders, their pop stars, and even their children, indelibly into the American empire.  Their presence is frequently in resistance to colonization, surely.  Other times, such as the poems “El Salvadoreño-Americano as Decolonizer, 1929-1936” and “The First Mexican American Astronaut Was Once,” I read Ramirez as a colonized intellectual a la Fanon, wrestling to provide meditative, compassionate portrayals that champion significant Latinx leaders whose jobs were ultimately intimately tied to American imperialism and settler colonization.  I lay exhausted with my back to the mat in this wrestle with Ramirez, as we struggle to recuperate a history banned once again and attempt to forge a future where our people may still be nourished by their roots.  The coming fascists will be willing to do more than ban us to stop us. It is our duty to survive.  It is our duty to keep writing down our truths.