Sebastían Páramo, Portrait of Us Burning, 

Northwestern University Press, 2024,

$18, 101 pgs, reviewed by Juania Sueños 

Sebastían Páramo’s debut poetry collection Portrait of Us Burning is a fiercely tender interrogation of family ties. What link exists between us and the torments of our father? Of our mother? Our brother? The book’s speaker swims through childhood memories, revisiting the kind of wound only family is capable of carving, hoping to see a phoenix rise from the ashes singing forgiveness.

The poem “Portrait of a Family I” poses the question, why do the deepest cuts come from those closest to us, from our blood, and why are they the easiest to justify? As Páramo puts it: “Are families what tenderness lacks?”

Each poem in the semi-autobiographical title pieces a family destroyed by a father’s infidelity during the speaker’s early childhood years. “We bleed in this split-in-two household,” the speaker mourns. While the arch unravels, grace blooms as a son uncovers his father’s own cuts, which, as he matures, he is able to place within a context of larger systems at play–intergenerational family violence, poverty, and the toll of crossing a border. The new country swallows the father’s dream and spits him out into hard manual labor. The author reflects, “We never understood/ what it took until later; we, siblings, found how/ he ruined his hands/ into blisters for a living…He never complained/ because his hands must be worthwhile,/ must not be left/ behind a fence.”  The speaker plants this realization of destructive sacrifice and feels its roots grow as understanding and tenderness. Nevertheless, there is anger quietly unearthed through the volume; Páramo continuously walks the tightrope between rage and gratitude toward the father figure. This struggle sometimes manifests as a voice directly addressing the author’s half-brother, father, and mother, but a more domineering voice converses with the speaker, the voice of festering childhood wounds. This double consciousness isn’t indicted, but rather gently annotated as “some inner child inside you asking.”

The heart of Portrait of Us Burning is seething tension between a kind of darkness birthed from trauma. This is especially poignant for children of first-generation immigrants. How can we be both grateful for our parents’ sacrifices, at times veering on martyrdom, while honoring the hurt we inherited from them? The speaker wrestles with this predicament in “My Father Never Speaks About His Father”

What is written about fathers is in our DNA.

It is a small childhood fury.

Where do i take my fists to pummel my brother & question

what is fair?

In the end, there is no resolution, but there is redemption in acknowledging our human frailty–as Páramo does, opening and closing with the gaping ravine between him and his father.

How did he get so fragile & distant,

as if the sky could bear his dreams

& ours–or pull the moon down with a rope.

My father, my father; I’m shaking with gratitude.

Forgiveness remains blurry—though in the title poem lays a declaration of beauty, an unfettering from a painful past:

“When can we abandon hurt–become the blazing eyes of burning.”

This review was first published in the February edition of the Caldwell Hays Examiner, A news outlet & curator attuned to issues of justice & equity in Caldwell & Hays counties.