Review: Pentimento by Joshua Garcia

Reviewed by Brian Czyzyk

Black Lawrence Press, 2024. 118 pages.

Joshua Garcia opens his debut collection, Pentimento, with a fracturing: “There are two of you (you being singular, but in two forms).” The proem, “Two Figures,” inspired by the painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” by David Hockney, introduces duality as a prominent theme in the collection as Garcia’s poems reckon with a self-image shattered by homophobia, religious trauma, assault, and chronic pain. Within this suffering, Garcia puts his speaker’s past in conversation with his present, piecing together fragments of memory and scripture alongside ekphrasis to suggest that looking back and grappling with the pain of the past is a way of moving forward, that speaking from the fixed confines of the page and finding the language to articulate anguish is a step toward connection and self-acceptance: “You propel yourself forward even as you stand in place.”

Garcia uses visual art prominently throughout his book as a vehicle for navigating the speaker’s crisis of faith that stems from the turbulent confluence of their Christianity and queerness. In one poem titled, “Self-Portrait as Andy Warhol as Saint Sebastian,” Garcia draws on the kinky and homoerotic subtext of religious art to call attention to the violence queer bodies endure from within and without:

Across from me, on the B train, Manhattan bound,
a boy puts his arm around a girl. They are not in danger, 
they do not know what it means to be cut to pieces, to find a way, 
out of necessity, to make themselves beautiful.

In another poem, the language of art opens the door for articulation of desire within the poet’s portraiture of a priest:

he, in his pink shirt, sfumatos with the heel
of a palm across the face. You imagine 
his fingers in your mouth, your flesh twisted
in his hook.

Even the collection’s title, Pentimento, is an art term defined in the epigraph as “a visible trace of a mistake or an earlier composition seen through later layers of paint on canvas,” and later in a poem as “the echo of an artist’s changed mind, / Italian—to repent—an object or a gesture altered, / replaced.” This title functions as a metaphor that illuminates how memories and experience accumulate, and the protective layers we attempt to place upon past mistakes or events we’d rather suppress.

If poetry is indeed “a moving picture” akin to visual art, as Philip Sidney claimed over 400 years ago, and words the medium taken to the canvas of the page, Garcia’s collection works not only to excavate the truth at the core of memories revised and reshaped by time, but also the forgotten denotations of words that lie beneath coat upon coat of history. Poems show religion, art, sexuality, and violence to be intertwined at an etymological level in words like the f-slur, which Garcia writes can mean “a cross to bear” and “a stake at which to burn.”And in another poem, the speaker invokes the French phrase “la petite morte,” underscoringthe conflation of sex and death. That Garcia points to the ways in which grief and joy, pain and pleasure overlap is evidence of a resistance to the overly simple rejection of faith and embrace of queer selfhood one might anticipate in work by a contemporary gay writer. Instead, Garcia’s speaker occupies more agnostic territory, stating in the penultimate poem, which revolves around a conversation with the speaker’s hairdresser,

We dance around it, but she comes back
to the question: Are you a Christian? And I don’t know
how to answer. Once, a denial would have been impossible.
…
Yet she recognized something that remains

This last sentence suggests that the speaker currently lives somewhere between doubt and belief, and that the thoughts and experiences of our past selves are not easily extricable from who we are now. Faith proves time and time again a lens for self-examination in Pentimento, as the speaker connects his suffering to that of Lot’s wife, John the Baptist in the desert, and Christ himself. Likewise, the poet does not ignore the shame, scrutiny, and isolation one can feel after coming out. In this way, Garcia’s debut performs the difficult work of reconciliation and refusing to succumb to easy narratives of triumphant survival, and crafts a much more thoughtful, rounded, and human portrait of growing through trauma as a result.

Indeed, this idea of fracturing, of the wounds we carry with and in us, is employed not only as fact or figure in Pentimento, but formally as well. Garcia’s lyric essays are assembled from fragments of memory, definitions, quotes, snippets of conversations, and recollections of dreams. Likewise, his poems frequently break long, sinuous sentences over several lines, separating ideas with white space or into couplets, emulating a contemplative or anxious mind that must briefly pause for breath before continuing its line of thought. This fragmentation creates a disorientation emblematic of trauma that is furthered when Garcia employs the second person, where the assault of a “you” (that is, the speaker) by a doctor comes to light. This distancing effect, coupled with the meditative, intellectual tone employed in many of the collection’s poems by way of simple, declarative sentences, results in work that is less emphatic than searching, painted more in subtle tones of curiosity and anxiety instead of effusive emotion and bombastic sonic play. If the emotional contours of Pentimento are difficult to trace, Garcia is aware and acknowledges his speaker’s reservation, “i thought i would never / let anything in,” identifying this reticence as a self-preservation instinct. But by working against this impulse, voicing grief and desire, Garcia pieces together a shining mosaic of poems that testifies to the true depths of pain and the power of survival.

Pentimento as a collection of poems is as meticulously arranged as an art exhibition. Pieces placed in proximity feel as if each build on what comes before to carry the book’s larger conversation. The poems reverberate with symmetry as images of flowers, flames, water, and wounds recur, each linguistic echo another complementary swipe of paint adorning Garcia’s canvas. The poems themselves take the forms of self-portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. There are even two sets of triptychs in Pentimento: one a trio of self-portraits paired with photographs that recreate works in Hal Fischer’s “Gay Semiotics” series, and the other a series of fragmented lyric essays that act as transitions between sections of the book. This curated symmetry of forms and subjects does negate some degree of surprise within the collection, with all poems in the book presented as either single stanzas, couplets, or fragmented essays, and the floral, aquatic, and body imagery recurring to such an extent over what is a quite capacious debut that the echoes threaten to overwhelm. Still, the network of images and thoughtful distribution of poems marks a debut compiled with diligence and care.

Pentimento marks a skillful, intelligent, and singular first collection. Reading this debut, I’m reminded that the words “wound” and “wonder” share a root, that perhaps opening ourselves to the possibility of hurt also opens us to the possibility of awe and splendor. Where Joshua Garcia admits, “I like the idea the whole world is born from a scar,” we may entertain the possibility that a consequence of pain may just be a kind of transformation or rebirth. By refusing to ignore our wounds, contending with our past mistakes, we may come to understand ourselves better and break through the silences layered over us so that we may see ourselves more fully in all our complicated beauty.

Brian Czyzyk is a poet from Traverse City, Michigan. His work has appeared in Waxwing, Tampa Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Poetry, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Purdue University and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas where he serves as Managing Editor for American Literary Review.