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Inside the Umber Iris
Erik Manuel Soto
—
Joseph Byrd on Inside the Umber Iris by Erik Manuel Soto
When I was seventeen years old, my mom received a phone call from a mother in the dance studio where she worked.
“I just saw your son in the post office,” this woman said, “with a Mexican.”
That was the whole point of the call, it appeared. And to my mother’s credit, she said “And you’re telling me this because…?”
The woman’s question was surreal, to say the least, an adjective created from the back-formation of the word surrealism, that literary and artistic movement from the 1920s “proclaiming the radical transformation of all existing social, scientific, and philosophical values through the total liberation of the unconscious.”* And I’d offer that the biggest word in that definition takes up the smallest amount of real estate: all. This “allness” is what Mexican-American poet Erik Manuel Soto achieves on every page of Inside the Umber Iris, a book that is soused in the ghastly goodness of what one’s array of familial ghosts can offer.
Séances and fever dreams, the open wounds of an apologetic god—and a grandmother in orbit of that great, artistic grandmother of us all, Frida Kahlo—all of these punctuate poem after poem in Soto’s debut collection and winner of the Gronk Nicandro First Book Prize. The syntactical prowess of that punctuation is on full display throughout, as “In Every Sun-Kissed Dream” demonstrates:
In every sun-kissed dream
the pink epiphyllum tucked
in Frida’s hair asks:
Does your heart still ache?
The stanza break between this question and the flower’s response is part of what puts the real in surreal. Soto waits, an unusual posture in today’s rapid-response world of ongoing arguments (debates too civilized a thing to call our current discourse), presupposing, and rightly so, that the space between, as well as that within, is what will inform our subsequent understanding. This is part of “the total liberation of the unconscious” in which Soto delights. The poem continues:
Yes, Frida, it hurts to be honey.
Between skin and nail
there are daisies with golden yolks
searching for soil
the color of concave olives.
Not only does the aforementioned space between stanzas crate serious conversational architecture, searching indeed for the needed soil of breath and pause, the next stanza’s response is a primer for all of us, a “Yes, and…” that unqualifiedly invites. This is what understanding can both be and do, and Soto’s book is full of just that, akin to what prayer is, wary as I am to name that historically and culturally loaded p-word onto the gossamer of Soto’s unbearably light book. But Inside the Umber Iris does what no less than George Herbert was wont to do, Herbert finishing his own “Prayer,” a gorgeously rigorous sonnet listing all manner of orisons, by ending with the deceptively simple words “Something understood.”
And though surrealism is not necessarily synonymous with understanding (understanding itself a thing in short supply today), Soto offers that strange but not impossible possibility of a third way. This new way of proceeding may, in fact, be the very thing at which the surrealists excelled, especially when considering those years between the two great world wars, the epoch in which surrealism found itself. We, too, find ourselves perched between some wildly oppositional realities in history. But Soto offers a way forward, as “In Every Sun-Kissed Dream” offers:
Even if the assemblage of all dying
grapes were to find solace
in emerald-bottled glasses,
I’d still see the skulls of monkeys
solarized on hooks tethered
to the corner of eroding bricks.
Frida, it hurts to be honey,
under a waning morning
I wander without a compass.
This wandering embraces that which is worthy of our trust, especially as the old compasses fail. Yes, our own, failed sense of smartness—how dumb have smartphones made us?—will be shown to us, brick after eroding brick, as many of the structures we once trusted fall into disrepair. And yes, it hurts to be that which comes from those creatures quietly disappearing because of Colony Collapse Disorder. Honeybees are tough as nails, but multiple theories offer an answer to their disturbing disappearance, including the prevalence of monocultural crops that literally starve our honey-makers because of malnutrition.**
We, too, are experiencing CCD, as our colonies collapse into disorder. I hear (and am applauding along with them) those who say “It’s about time,” seeing as colonization has long been the bane of much of the world. In this, Soto’s book is an oasis, and a bus stop, and a siesta, a parade of pauses that lingers on the tongue, already part of a “solution” that invites us to attend, with the poet, Surrealism School, sharing his luminous lunch of “dark apple cores” as he tells all of us to “Come as you are,” in the book’s opening poem:
Song, hold onto my hand
when you discover
the murder of innocent
wavering wheat fields
came from your polluting chorus.
Surrealists, like Soto, eschew monoculture. The phone used in that phone call to my mother literally melts off the surrealist page into something unrecognizable, becoming a thing far more communicative than the damning and dangerous cultural assumptions of who belongs where, and what boundaries should be in place in order to “achieve” such separations. Soto turns such trash into a rainbow of treasures, in “If the obsidian bottle could talk,” without pulling his punches, or making excuses for those who came before him:
If the obsidian bottle could talk,
you would know, your father’s wings
were wounded by his father
with cigarette butts
and shards of wine bottles.
But for Soto, endings and abuses hold devastating possibilities of almost unreal freedoms:
Father knows grasshoppers gnaw
on ambered skies,
he has seen eagles emerge out
the underbelly of cows,
and has witnessed his father
turn his mother’s eye sockets
into aster petals.
This is the magic of the mortician, though not one that mummifies. These dyings bring life, and Soto, using the reflection of a beautifully broken family mirror, helps his own father to heal what’s been done to him, as well as to all of us, recollecting this strange circus fragments and allowing a new light to shine through such stained glass.
Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec God of the Dead, brings us full circle in “Dusk was a scarlet tongue:”
Konetl, mitsalone a,
iuan mitsalone mikis.
kenih tlauilli tlamatoka
inon kamilitiixpolomeh
mitsmochintin uil itta ka mikistli
Son, alone you come here,
and alone you will die.
When sunrise touches
those umber eyes,
all you will see is death.
Inside the Umber Iris is a textbook on seeing. Soto charms us, however, into using new eyes, ones that can help us learn to see both the possibilities and the profundities of life in that which is dying. “Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that,”*** Neale Donald Walsch writes. Thus is Soto a vital guide during these surreal times, helping us find a new way to both let go of, and to end, the old.
* From “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language”
** The Mystery of the Disappearing Honeybees / Saving Earth / Encyclopedia Britannica
*** Neale Donald Walsch, Facebook post, July 22, 2014
Review by
Joseph Byrd
03.02.26
Joseph Byrd is a 2025 Best Small Fictions winner, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he currently serves as Poetry Editor for The Plentitudes.
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