What Was the Matter with Us That We Did Not Fear Such Breaking: The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana, reviewed by Linda Michel-Cassidy


The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana examines the personal and the historic by way of a dismantled dictionary, one which the poet dissects and makes strange. To be clear, this book is not built from abecedarian poetry (as in the alphabetic form used as the overriding devise), rather, it is a direct address, a surgery, and reconstruction. Winner of this year’s Northern California Book Award, The Disordered Alphabet is a stunning debut collection.

The book’s brilliant use of  wordplay and language experimentation is announced by the introductory poem, “Word”: “Widsith spoke unlocked / their wordhoard, they who / sent upon us a wellcloud of / wordpour, abundance—”. Using the language and cadences of legend, plural first-person, and biblical references, the speaker warns that every massive rebuilding demands a prior and vast disintegration: “windows and fountains / above the great deep broke / open at once and the words / rained down upon us”. The poem, a narrow, hard-edged column on the page, feels like a scroll unfurling. 

The speaker warns of the tumult to follow, “All the earth was / made wet and webbed-wide, /a well and a wellspring, a / worden” and then offers a hint of consolation, “the sluices of / heaven wording, as we / stood in that great rushing //wind within, yet without // name turning.” While this poem serves as a prologue, it may be useful to think of it as an overture. It tells the reader more about emotion and breadth than it does of narrative. Santana’s muscular use of language somehow feels both ancient and invented.

The collection, the poet’s first, utilizes an array of forms, including: epistles to the letters of the alphabet, odes, note/list poems, and, yes,  a few abecedarian and reverse-abecedarian poems. The modes used enhance the concerns of the speaker, making for complex, curious poems that could have been written by no other poet. Santana is a seer in linguist’s clothing. We tend to think of language as a tool, whereas Santana makes us consider the flash of molten metal that comes before the forging. These poems are both close investigation and combustion. 

In the alphabet poems, the speaker addresses individual letters by “name.” This device, in lesser hands, would surely come off as flip, but these poems howl. In “Dear O” the speaker begs, “O, / I am out of my mind / and in the woods with grief; / the world is whacked / and out of order.” This poem is more playful than many in the collection, yet still maintains a sense of astonished dread. How dare a life, a universe, be so very much. At its end, the poem turns wide: “Mouth without voice, / you circle round. / 1.3 billion years away, / ago, two black holes collide; / a bell in the universe / rings.” 

“Dear T” (p28) is a spare lament—nothing is cushioned: “From under my wing / they are taken. // First my father / then my firstborn. // Take it, the world/ tells me.” The speaker flinches, almost. “Back, I say, / take my breath.” The epistolary-ish poems appear in nonalphabetical order throughout the collection. In some cases, they ruminate on the letter-addressee and are a shift from other more image-laden poems. Another “Dear T” poem (p29) talks of bomb sites. The compressed language and narrow shape of the poem contrasts against the ever-widening cloud from such an explosion. Here, linguistic simplicity highlights the horror, “Someone takes the train. / Someone else, // the bullet. Towns, entire / too, are taken.” 

“[D]” which appears mid-way through the book, feels like a version of the book’s origin story. It begins, “I found a Dictionary in my Dream, / A Book so like a Door” ending with “And language detonate— / And every word a World contained / And meaning to be made—”. At first I wondered, why offer this explanation so late in the collection? With time, I suspect that this straightforwardness appearing as a prologue would not actually set up the reader for what would follow. Placed directly after the delightfully brief “Self-Portrait as the Letter I” whose body reads simply, but also not simply: “Improvise.”— “[D]” snaps the reader back to the business of the book.

In talking about the personal (heritable illness, the mother) as well as more universal and historic topics (Hiroshima, night albums, the twin towers), Santana proves an agility that goes beyond tactical use of language, while always reveling in it. “At Forty I Dream of Home” and “Grief, Summer” move through grieving the loss of the mother, whereas “Want” factors in daughterhood and heritance. Later in the book, “Inherit” speaks directly about visible inherited factors, and the prior poems inform us that the speaker is talking about much more: about disease, inevitability, of the things we have to mourn.

One of my favorite poems is not “for” a specific letter, but instead is a list poem using the form of endnotes. “Notes to the Name and Its Translations” reads as an explanatory addendum to a text we cannot access. Each unit of the poem reads as a continued thought or explanation, maybe even talkback, to an earlier thought. Numbered and fact-like, they demand to be taken seriously and in order, each pointing at, but never offering, enlightenment. Except #18: “All the while, the body, breathing.” We are alive yet already dying, and there’s nothing to be done about it. 

While clearly enjoying and being adept at wordplay, nothing about these poems feels tricky or forced. As a reader, it’s a complicated thing to thrill with the brilliant use of language, all while thinking of destruction, genetic fate, and an array of losses—how dare such damage come in such an enticing package?  From “Portrait of a Marriage as Library after Air Raid, London, 1940”: “Luck has left / the tidy shelves of books intact (…) Defy, they say. Survive, survive.” Picture the beautiful wreckage—a sight most of us will never have to endure—still we are astonished. Santana merges that horror, amazingly, with possibility: “What was once roof reveals the vastness / of the sky. Inside becomes outside. // Everywhere, the shock of light.”