Pitt MFA alumnus Brandom Som (2002) made a virtual visit to Pitt this past fall, joining students in my “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” class to discuss his collection Tripas (University of Georgia Press, 2023), which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2024. The class had been closely reading the book with interest, knowing Som had once walked the same campus they did. Currently an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego, Som encouraged Pitt undergrads to ask questions about the life experiences and writing process behind the collection, of which London Review of Books critic Stephanie Burt wrote, “American family elegy has rarely found such multilayered wordplay.”
The multilayered wordplay is rooted in Som’s heritage and the languages he was steeped in while growing up as a native English speaker: his mother’s family had Mexican roots, while his father’s roots were in China. In both cases, the older members of Som’s extended family spoke dialects of their respective languages. His Mexican American maternal grandmother worked for Motorola, inspecting chips to be used for telephones. His Chinese American paternal grandfather was a grocer in the barrio chino near Phoenix, Arizona. Som spent a much of his childhood with his nana while his divorced mother worked; he also spent time with his father’s family, helping at the grocery, as he recalls in the poem “Half”:
His hands out
& thumb wet, my father laid the bills down to teach me
to count change back. Above him, in Phoenix heat,
a light snow fell on the harnessed Clydesdales
inside a Bud sign.
As Stephanie Burt observes in her review of Tripas, the collection is much more autobiographically detailed and narrative than Som’s first book, The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2014), winner of both the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. At the same time, the poetry is highly crafted and linguistically textured: the result of attending to words—both those understood and those only understood to signify the rich and often fraught pasts of the family members using them, or to signify love, protection, and separation as the flipside of connection.
Separation and connection come through in metaphors related to circuitry. One student in the “Readings” class, an engineering major, asked Som about these metaphors’ role in his conception of the book, whose cover design deploys a pattern of electrical schematic symbols that the student recognized from his STEM studies. Som explained that he got deeply involved in learning about his grandmother’s factory work, looking at diagrams for circuits in order to “pay attention and make visible what is unseen.” This process teased out what he termed “the invisible connections” that have helped him “reconnect [his] heritages.”
Such an interface of life experience with linguistics and physics charges Som’s metaphorical circuitry throughout the book, allowing physics to morph into genetics and neurology when Som asserts, near the end of the poem “Fuchi” (a Spanish word expressing disgust with a smell and often used to react to flatulence), “What kind of seeing is hard- / wired in our circuitry?” Those lines carry forward the opening lines of “Code Switches,” an earlier poem in the collection: “Cómo se dice, my circuitry, sews me—me cose— / word by word & dictates—how do you say?”
Students in the class wanted to know about how Som’s relatives regarded his poetry, given that the older ones came from working-class backgrounds where work was understood as long physical labor. Som referred to their active contributions, including that of his maternal grandmother, whose engagement with Som’s efforts to tell a complex lyrical story of origins is recounted in the poem “Close Reading”: “In her own hand, she keeps / a list of dichos—for your poems, she says.” The book, as the title of this poem suggests, closely reads these dichos, or “sayings,” with an eye to embodying, with tenderness and respect, the struggles of immigrants in the United States within and beyond his family tree. In the same poem, he refers to the Chinese characters for “forest” that make up his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, bringing both of his grandmothers together at the end in a moving metaphor in which separation and connection poignantly coexist:
My two grandmothers:
one’s name keeps a pasture,
the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,
it was with short, forced words
like first strokes when sawing—
trying to set the teeth into the grain.
As I write this review, it's the end of January 2025. I’m hearing news of Latinx immigrants in Pittsburgh going into hiding and Asian students at universities hesitating to gather for New Year celebrations. This brilliant collection of poems is not only a timely testament to the experience of immigrants and their descendants but also a master class in a poetics that, in Whitman’s words, “contains multitudes.”
—Ellen McGrath Smith