You’ll know, from the first words of the first poem, “La Nieta,” of Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s incredible Tales from the House of Vasquez, published in 2018 by Rattle, that these are poems of women’s lives, women’s souls, women’s realities. Men rarely even appear on these pages: a priest, here and there; a father, a brother, a grandfather. They are bit players here, for this is a world of women.
Reclaimings of faith seem to be a theme for me this year, and in Tales from the House of Vasquez, Gilliland reclaims. Adam gets a mention or two, sure—but it’s Eve with whom we spend time, Eve who claims herself. She is not the only sacred figure here. In “The Tale of Kitchen Spirits” Gilliland writes of a past filled with women who could speak to spirit, who speak not with words:
Spirits don’t use words, slow things / that they are. Spirits talk to the bones, / the hands, the hips. Wood women / spoke to the spirits the most.
It is men who break this connection, sending women indoors, claiming to speak for gods when “they’d stopped hearing / spirits years before. It happened so / slow and soft.” It’s a delicate web Gilliland weaves here, and it is also a defiant one. Those men may have pushed women inside, into homes and kitchens, out of the ways of the world, but, she tells us, they have not yet entirely severed the connection between women and gods.
Depression runs through the House of Vasquez, but, unlike the House of Usher, the Vasquez women don’t fall. They struggle upright, to be sure, and not all of them survive: the heartbreaking “The Tale of La Margaret” is proof enough of that. Throughout Tales from the House of Vasquez Gilliland looks at her own postpartum depression, and the depression running throughout her maternal line, carrying forth women’s voices and girls’ lives to bring flesh to their mental health—though, to be honest, mental health seems like a pale word for the agony and the glory this chapbook shows us.
Tales from the House of Vasquez is so rich with symbolism, so defiant, so beautiful, so tender and sad, that it seems almost impossible to visit every moment or discuss every theme. But one thing I will say, here, is that I have seen this chapbook described as magical realism, but I don’t think that’s how I would describe it. It feels, to me, too much like Pedro Páramo for that. And is it magic, if it is also belief?
Though, in truth, I think this entire chapbook is magic encased in paper, and will remain so no matter how many times I may read it.
Essentially a Nerd 