‘Woman Without Shame’ Review: Sandra Cisneros Makes a Triumphant Return to Poetry

Sandra Cisneros is a legend in Chicanx literature, with a career that has spanned more than 40 years. Her latest work, “Woman Without Shame,” is her first new collection of poetry in 28 years, and it is a brazen triumph.

Cisneros is best known for her 1984 novel “The House on Mango Street” — a fact she pointedly mentions in the acknowledgements of her new collection, writing, “It seems the success of my fiction in my lifetime has overshadowed the fact that I was once a poet. I still am.” Yes, Sandra Cisneros is still a poet, and she’s determined not to let us forget it. She writes in plain free verse, without excessive ornamentation, which works to the collection’s benefit. Her poetry is candid, often humorous, and, as the title suggests, utterly shameless.

Split into five sections, “Woman Without Shame” demonstrates Cisneros’s ability to navigate a wide range of subjects and styles with ease. The three-line “Swallows, Guanajuato Airport,” a snapshot of birds flying inside an airport, can be recited within a single breath. In contrast, the magnificent “You Better Not Put Me in a Poem” is a twelve-page reflection on Cisneros’s lengthy list of past lovers. Cisneros flows through this astonishing variety of poems with dexterity, moving skillfully from topics of aging to politics to sex.

At 67 years old, Cisneros writes frankly about aging with refreshing lightness and humor, forgoing any self-pity to celebrate her own aging body. In “At Fifty, I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor,” she writes, “Passé? I am but vintage.” And in “Funny Bone,” Cisneros pokes fun at her own joints with an amusing riff on William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”: “So much depends / Upon a staircase / Glazed with / Rainwater / Seven / Years / Ago.” One can imagine her laughing as she writes these poems, appreciating her own smile lines.

The poems in “Woman Without Shame” seamlessly blend Spanish and English, allowing each poem to speak naturally in whichever language best conveys its message. Cisneros has also included three poems written entirely in Spanish, each followed by an English translation. This trinity of poems — “Cielo con sombrero,” “Cielo sin sombrero,” and “Quiero ser maguey en mi próxima vida” — compose some of the collection’s strongest work, holding gravity in both languages. Also deserving of a mention is the brilliant “Te A—,” a vividly written poem about teenage lovers interrupted in the middle of graffiting the words “te amo” on a wall.

Cisneros’s poetry doesn’t shy away from politics, both in the United States and in Mexico. The poem “El Hombre,” dedicated to the late Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, comments on violence, poverty, and crime in Mexico and the United States, each stanza punctuated by the line “Mándanos luz. Send us all light.” Like the rest of the collection, Cisneros’s political commentary is wry and unflinching. In “God Breaks the Heart Again and Again Until It Stays Open,” Cisneros questions the poem’s title, asking, “But what if my heart is a chupacabrón chanting, ‘Build the wall!’?”

Throughout the collection, Cisneros writes openly about her sex life, destigmatizing female desire and finding love in one’s old age. But it’s in “Cisneros sin censura,” the penultimate section, where Cisneros truly lets loose. In poems such as “Variations in White” and “My Mother and Sex,” she approaches sexuality with frankness and undiluted appreciation, from writing on intimacy with a lover to her mother’s ironic discomfort around the topic of sex. The crowning achievement of this section is “You Better Not Put Me in a Poem,” the longest work in the collection and written exquisitely as a series of anecdotes about the men in her previous relationships. Unapologetic about the poem’s length and content, she writes, “I was/am/always will be a romantic.”

“Woman Without Shame” marks Cisneros’s revelatory return to the world of poetry. Through this collection, Cisneros openly celebrates that which society has deemed taboo — her aging body, her bilingualism, her personal connection to Mexico, and her sexuality. And these poems are most clear about one thing: These fundamentally human experiences are nothing to be ashamed of.

—Staff writer Samantha H. Chung can be reached at samantha.chung@thecrimson.com.