Jen Yáñez-Alaniz’s Surrogate Eater

Alabrava Press, $17, 36pgs, 2023

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz’s Surrogate Eater digs into moments of desire, disordered eating, and ancestry. Her work rings with the intensity of a Tori Amos album, its reverberations lasting in the body. The epigraph that preludes the first poem reads, “I must be a mermaid…I have no fear of depth and great fear of shallow living,” a quote by Anaïs Nin. This fitting epigraph accurately portrays Yáñez-Alaniz’s poetry, there is no shallow living here.  The speaker’s unbridled desire announces itself in this first poem, “Patron Saint of Moist Things,”

In my surrender,
in my memory, you untie the blue ribbon
from around my thigh, your teeth releasing the knot.
My openness tastes of fig and tamarind,
glistened cadence on the tongue.

Yáñez-Alaniz’s Surrogate Eater follows in the lineage of great art about women who are filled with the need to embody the other. Like Bergman’s Persona, Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., and Haynes’s May December, Yáñez-Alaniz’s poetry traces the amorphous border between her sexual desire and her desire to embody the beloved’s physicality. This is present in the titular poem, “Surrogate Eater,” with lines like “mine yearns to mirror your body. / Yours refuses fat so naturally.” She continues to describe the intimacy and longing for both sexual and physical hunger with her lines:

I love the rimming of your lips
around the spoon of mounded ice-cream
I deny myself to eat.

The sweetness of your breath
Invites my tongue to lap the taste
of sugar lingering on yours.

In “Bordando la Flor,” the speaker recounts generational self-hate and gendered surveillance of their bodies. The speaker’s Tia Lucía comes to visit her every summer, checking to see if the speaker has kept her promise of a 20-inch waist. Yáñez-Alaniz describes this body-checking routine, 

I tie two laces tightly together. Measure out 20 inches.
Two for the deep-cut knot into my skin.

Clinched laces around my waist. Elimination
of unnecessary food and flesh-clint. My stomach empty.

Woven between these descriptions of starvation are details of the speaker’s floral embroidery, her tia tells her, “A habit she assures me is essential for a young girl.” The poem ends with the two subjects intertwined,

Tia Lucia holds me accountable to 20 inches
and my virtue, “Enséñame tu cinturita, mija.
Estás cuidando tu flor?”

One visit, she finds me at 18 inches, skin tight
around the ribs — Drained intestines. Drained petals.
— A siphoned flower.

Yáñez-Alaniz digs beneath the gendered stereotypes of the feminine, using floral imagery in juxtaposition to the speaker’s starvation—a wilted flower.

Negative body image is a pervasive issue for generations of women, one that lurks beneath the surface much like the severed ear in Blue Velvet’s idyllic suburbia. These issues manifest through compliments on a niece’s weight loss as a result of starvation, eating disorders passed down through generations, or a mother’s comments on a daughter’s weight gain.

Surrogate Eater does the work of fragmenting poetry together about the body—its senses, its ecstasy, and its deprivation. It is a celebration and document of where Yáñez-Alaniz has been and where she is going. Wherever  her poetry goes, I want to follow.