A Review of Jose Hernandez Diaz’s The Parachutist
By Natalie Tombasco
As I write this review, it is Inauguration Day in America. A focal point of the 2024 election was anti-immigrant rhetoric, promises of mass deportation, denaturalization of birthright citizenship, and bulking up border security. Gloria Anzaldúa once explained, “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” To Jose Hernandez Diaz, the “unnatural” Trumpian wall is punched down by “a man in a Chicano Batman shirt—” a new poetic superhero defiant of boundaries in all manifestations. Author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American, Diaz’s latest full-length poetry collection, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, January 2025) offers a lofty vehicle to escape the harsh realities of our time—the physical and psychological borders that present limitations to the individual.
Diaz deconstructs the American ethos from a Chicano perspective, one raised in the barrios of Southern California. A place fenced off by expressways and impenetrable gated communities—isolated from the rest of Anglo-America. Paradoxically, it is a place of safety, interdependence, and “familial tenderness.” Diaz aims to uncover what it means to live on the hyphen of immigrant experience. The poems celebrate the resiliency and inherited hardships of family lore while elegizing what is lost through the act of assimilation as a first-generation Mexican American: “You will never be enough. . .. / Not Latinx enough. / Not American enough.” He code-switches from an academic referencing Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” to yearning for bilingualism by weaving in “broken Spanish” into his mostly English poetry. In this way, Diaz reveals linguistic hierarchies, showing how a Microsoft spellcheck highlights Spanish as an unknown or misspelled English word—autocorrecting him toward whiteness.
“The Border” emphasizes the contradictory desires of the American populace who disregard the significant percentage of undocumented migrants in the U.S. economy: an unseen labor force that keeps grocery and construction prices low to maintain the “blooming decadence” and “artificial convenience” of a white-picket dream. “They have built a border[,]” he writes, “At the curb of Home Depot, when they want jornaleros—/ Between cheap labor and the structures of discrimination.” Diaz nods to this familiar scene—the hypocrisy of the MAGA-hat American at the local Taco Tuesday for half-priced margs.
A primary mission for Diaz is to dip into the personal, documenting the unheard stories of his family and community with a journalistic eye. The collection opens with “Jorge Ramos is from Guanajuato.” This is untrue, as the speaker fact-checks his father that Ramos is actually from Mexico City. However, he discovers the “great pride” this alternative fact provides the father by fabricating that his national hero known as “The Walter Cronkite of Latin America” is from his home city. Truth and fiction blur as Diaz’s narratives elevate the ordinary to mythic proportions, like when he imagines his father “play[ing] his guitar on the surface of the moon” in “El Mariachi.” He considers the creation and artistic potential of the generations before him by noting, “My abuelo was the true poet: / The way he wrote the earth with his hands.” The Parachutist carries an ars poetic impulse where Diaz pulls back the curtain on process and revision. The artist-speaker underscores the metatextuality of his lyricism by including the poem title in the ending lines (“Sunflowers in the City” and “When the Government Wasn’t Run by Clowns”) and references the humbling grind of po-biz such as receiving rejections. Diaz details a day in the life of a 21st-century poet who shares Lorca on social media and serves as an overall good literary citizen, yet admits in “The Most Poetic Thing” that he witnessed “at the local library, an O.G. from the neighborhood with gang tattoos” shepherding his daughters through alphabetical stacks. Diaz’s breaking of the fourth wall of poem-writing, economical language, and spotlight on everyday Americans is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara.
Diaz finds poetry’s power to lift into the speculative. As a study on the American Dream-Logic, the prose poem form reigns supreme as he withholds exposition, dropping the reader into a new dimension. Surreal, Kafkaesque, humorous—it is a dazzling effect that recalls the poems of Russell Edson and James Tate while simultaneously paying homage to prolific Latinx poets like Virgil Suárez and Eduardo C. Corral. Diaz invites real, dead, fantastical, and mythological figures to rub elbows: clowns, skeletons, Goya, Picasso, Kukulkan, turquoise jaguars, and the L.A. Dodgers. One can read “Aliens” through a sci-fi lens but may also associate Robert Hayden’s “[American Journal]” in how Diaz uses these devices to explore illegal status. This is apparent when “The Parrot” asserts a new identity upon the speaker (“I’m not a Gonzalez. I’m a Hollis-Ordóñez”) or when in a bureaucratic hellscape, a paper-pushing centaur denies entry for not possessing proper identification.
A recurring protagonist, the man in the Pink Floyd shirt, finds comfort in “The Box—” a cardboard, simple form that transports him to different cultures, times, and stories. Similarly, for “The Man in the Zorro Mask,” the bottom of “the empty well” offers him physical confinement, a deprivation of nature “that fuels the art.” Prose poetry ushers in the spontaneity necessary for imaginative flight—and multiple ascensions occur in the collection from astronauts to balloons, from helicopters to the Romantic sublime. “The Parachutist” reminds us that all the adrenaline junkies, performers, and explorers (i.e. “The Fire Eater”) seek to fight an enemy in the “war against the mundane.” Jose Hernandez Diaz knows the descent back to earth requires a poetic ripcord to release the chute and save us from free fall.
NATALIE LOUISE TOMBASCO is a poet from Staten Island, NY. Tombasco holds an MFA from Butler University and a doctoral degree in creative writing from Florida State University. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa, where she also serves as Nonfiction Editor of Tampa Review. Recent work can be found in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her debut collection Milk for Gall has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was published by Southern Indiana Review in 2024. Find out more at www.natalielouisetombasco.com