Be Recorder

Carmen Gimenez Smith’s sixth book of poetry, Be Recorder (2016), shares with her previous work a range of tone, linguistic complexity, and formal experimentation. However, this set of poems takes on timely issues, connecting to matters of personal, cultural, and political importance in modern America. Its themes include race and the immigrant experience, class and economic instability, and gender and misogynist culture. By contemplating her own experiences as a Latinx person born to immigrant parents, as a consumer besieged by capitalism excess, and as a woman who has cobbled together the life she wants after navigating setbacks, Smith urges her readers to rebellion. We must fight “against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it.” Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2019 and was on the longlist for the PEN Open Book Award in 2020.

The collection is divided into three sections, which can be broadly described as addressing the past, present, and future.

The ten poems in the first section, “Creation Myth,” explore the different ways that Smith’s own identity could be defined: through kinship to various family members or through her gender expression when she was a girl and now that she is an adult woman. The poems are in blank verse but use traditional punctuation and grammar.



The opening poem, “Origins,” delves into the author’s relationship to her ethnicity. She invites her readers to inhabit her experiences, changing their perspective into her own—a move that will allow them to understand that what might from the outside look like “paranoia” is actually “the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.” The speaker can’t help being hyperaware at all times—this is the result of a lifetime of others misjudging and misperceiving her.

A more lighthearted poem, “Boy Crazy,” comes from the point of view of an adolescent girl who longs for the freedom boys traditionally enjoy to be possible for girls also.

In the wry “No Apology: A Poemifesto,” the speaker is an adult woman who has decided to stop constantly saying sorry, even as she recognizes that the urge to excuse herself for things that aren’t her fault is unavoidable—it’s an action that most girls growing up in America have internalized.



“Interview Follow-Up” is an affirmation of the speaker’s immigrant roots. She is both aware of the stereotypes surrounding those who come to this country and willing to use them to advance her job prospects:

[my] qualifications are that
I am an immigrant mother twice removed thus
motivated to ruthlessly carry my babies to the top

The section ends with “Self as Deep as a Coma,” which describes life with manic depression for a speaker whose sense of self, family of origin, and broader culture refuse to make room for the self-care and medical interventions necessary to treat mental illness.



The second section comprises the collection’s title poem, “Be Recorder,” which covers 46 pages and is formally and linguistically experimental and dense. The poem addresses the ways in which the speaker is part of a system that encompasses “capitalism, chauvinism, white supremacy, and consumer culture.” Even as she can point out these injustices, she has internalized most of them as part of assimilating herself into America. But despite this assimilation, the speaker is still deeply aware of her otherness, describing herself as “foreign in America.” From this outsider position, the speaker urges revolution and rebellion—first through the act of recording, observing, and capturing, and then through joining her in a unifying “Spartacus” reaction.

The third section of the collection, “Birthright,” is made up of ten poems that consider legacy and the future. The highlight, according to critics, is “Beasts,” a moving description of the horror of watching a beloved mother decline into dementia.

The odic “In Remembrance of Their Labors” is a paean that rails against the self-made ideal of American culture by thanking the poet’s predecessors: everyone from family to inspiring artists who have made her work possible. She praises the “hustlers” on her father’s side, the “civil servants” on her mother’s side, and the great thinkers of “feminist poetic discourse” such as “Gloria, Cherríe, bell hooks, Audre Lorde.”



“American Mythos” takes a small moment of the speaker’s life—should she buy her son a video game from Amazon.com—and turns it into a meditation on the intersection of consumerism, glorified violence, familial love, and race.

In the playful “Terminal Hair,” the speaker wonders whether female facial hair—which the speaker describes as an ethnically-inflected marker—should be proudly held aloft as a powerful link to women ancestors from the past:

We speculate our moustaches
connect us to a remote ancestress whose moustache
was denser than ours.



In summing up this wide-ranging work, The Washington Post wrote, “As she documents a range of subjects―including reality TV, capitalism and the exploitation of immigrant workers―Smith questions how an individual’s experiences are shaped by the dominant culture and how to push back.”