Muscle Memory

The thing that first brought me to Kyle Carrero Lopez’s poetry, and which held me there, which stirred me to stay, is his honesty, an exuberant/charming/fierce/poignant realness that sounds inimitable because it is. Throughout this profuse debut, Kyle encounters and confronts the fetishization, commodification, and resignification of the black experience, navigating the fraught latinx and black [poc] imaginary as it is produced and reproduced by white people while rubbing up against the paradox and privilege of every “Black capitalist wet dream” which, with undeniable Cubanía, here includes a boundless joy, bodied through an inventory of a “quick Thai lunch” and glitters of picadillo and beef empanadas after the confetti of last night’s revelry converges with a march for Black Lives Matter to remind us that all of these, all of this, is a celebration of life. “Symbolism and/Personhood aren’t friends,” Kyle cautions in “Beauty Examined”; MUSCLE MEMORY is a tribute to the African diasporic experience across the Americas and beyond, a confounding that resists simple geographies, neat histories, threadbare politics, inclusion-exclusion dialectics of belonging, and the aesthetic markings of a liberal and cosmopolitan literary art market that consumes black bodies whole and in pieces, in life and in death.

—Chris Campanioni