Diana Marie Delgado: The Germ of Someone

In her debut poetry collection, Tracing the Horse, Diana Marie Delgado uses taut language and controlled recursion to render the life of her young narrator as she navigates the boundaries of her world in La Puente, a barrio in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. The poems are ethereally beautiful—razor-sharp and dreamlike at once—as they explore the heavy realities and expectations of family, poverty, drugs, crime, and sexual exploitation. They are hard to look at straight-on sometimes, like an eclipse. Delgado handles this desire to look, and impulse to turn away, by creating what poet Lorna Dee Cervantes called “multiversed, multivalanced, multivoiced verses where the point of view is singular and the vision, fractured and fractal.” In Tracing the Horse, Delgado writes a family existing in the beats between violence: holy, dangerous, and true. Delgado writes for us a pinhole projector, by which we can stare straight into the sun—if we’re brave.

The photograph that is the book’s cover shows Delgado’s parents standing between phone booths. Her father holds an infant Diana in his arms, proud and high. His feet are in first position. Her mother stands behind him, her hand on his elbow. She peers at the camera, demure, with giant eyes. The photo on the cover is the first poem of the collection, and the table of contents, the second: “Prayers for What’s in Me to Finally Come Out,” “The Sea Is Farther Than Thought,” “Notes for White Girls,” “The Kind of Light I Give Off Isn’t Going to Last,” “Never Mind I’m Dead,” and on and on. The poems gallop off from there, each title blooming into a memory, a whisper, a haunting—a horse in the night, flashing by lightning-fast. And you’ll read them lightning-fast, too, hungry