The Lost Nostalgias, Esteban Rodríguez, CavanKerry Press, 2025, pgs 98, $18, ISBN: 9-781960-327116, reviewed by cloud cardona
Esteban Rodríguez knows a lot about love letters. For one, Love Letter is the name of the coffee shop he co-runs with his wife in McAllen, TX. Rodríguez’s latest poetry collection, The Lost Nostalgias is also a love letter to the RGV. This collection navigates us into the memories of Rodríguez’s childhood and odes to his parents, detailing their successes and struggles. Rodríguez’s collection is a love letter not only to the narrator’s family, but to all immigrant families who carve out a life for their families in the U.S.
The first two lines of The Lost Nostalgias read, “When my mother would open her mouth, / I’d imagine a set of fossils, yellowed.” Rodriguez details his mother’s teeth troubles, suffering from cavities and plaque and pulled out teeth, that was perhaps caused by her smoking habit or maybe by some “old country curse,” which is also the title of the first section. Just as he imagines his mother’s dentist as an archaeologist, Rodriguez also works as an archaeologist, excavating his past throughout this collection.
Throughout The Lost Nostalgias, Rodriguez reflects on his adolescence both with care and perspective. In “Tongue,” one of the first poems of the collection, Rodriguez catalogs the way his parents, especially his mother, mispronounced English words like: explain like “esplain,” beach like “bitch,” congratulations like “congrachoolashuns,” and adding the past tense “ed” to words that don’t need it. He sets up “Tongue” with a memory with his mother:
And so why not move into lecture, laugh
when my mother says esplain, the x trapped
in the back of her mouth. Why not cut her off,
say, with such authority, It’s explain, Mom.
In his retelling of this memory, Rodriguez captures that teenage feeling of smugness at the beginning of his poem. His use of anaphora, the “why not”s build into this moment in the poem that cascades to the end of the section. On the last “why not,” he reflects on helping her at a governmental appointment, “she would again turn to me, expect, / because I knew so much, / to make that English / less useless, less harsh.” What I most admire about this poem is how he reframes his parents’ mispronunciations. In the third section of the poem titled “Beach,” Rodríguez adds a sense of sweetness and admiration through his use of end rhyme, “because I know, regardless of what she can / and cannot say, she’ll speak with a confidence / I can only hope to convey.”
In section two, “At The Feet of the Empty-Handed,” Rodriguez recalls memories of his father and his own relationship to masculinity. The section ends with “Bury,” a poem that describes his father buying a baseball bat at a yard sale and later swinging it at empty cans and old car parts. Rodríguez closes the poem and the section with these couplets:
over his head, and will all his strength,
smashing the ground till he made a hole,
one, I believed, where he could bury
If not his anger, then at least his regret—
everything he could have done, every
version of himself he could have been.
Rodríguez has mastered volta, shining in the emotional turns and endings of his poems. He shifts from this mundane memory of his father going to a garage sale into a larger observation about his father’s frustration with himself, swinging at “what / had long been ignored.”
In the collection’s last section, “Secondhand Eulogies,” Rodriguez reflects on ancestors, ranging from retellings of grandparents crossing over to the U.S. to his abuelo’s memories of Vietnam. In one of my favorite poems of the collection, “Narratives,” Rodríguez reflects on how his family tends to dramatize their experiences. Rodríguez ponders,
Isn’t this how stories go? Aren’t narratives
always changed? Doesn’t the teller hide
the truth at first, when they feel they have
the right to heal, peel back the surface,
reveal every detail, every second of pain.
And don’t some exaggerate as well,
feel the need to up the stakes, like my uncle,
who when he talks about the hard time
he did, means his one night in jail.
What Rodriguez here captures is the “telenovela feeling” that many Mexican-American families may be familiar with. He ends “Narratives” with a return to the self, detailing the lies he told “when I tell my mother that the bruises / on my neck aren’t hickeyes at all, / but the aftermath of mosquito bites.”
The last image in The Lost Nostalgias is of Rodriguez’s father, proudly standing in the yard of his new house, imagining that all his hard labor had paid off. Rodríguez writes:
this three-bedroom
two bath, this finished driveway
and thick green lawn, yes,
this was the best reward.
After finishing this book, I felt a sense of kinship and joy for families like the one described in The Lost Nostalgias. Rodríguez paints an honest portrait of his family without romanticizing the struggle. He shares both the ugly truths and their moments of vulnerability. The Lost Nostalgias invites us to sit outside and feel pride in what our hands have accomplished.
