Toxic Masculinity, poems by Fernando Albert Salinas
This book is a requiem. The original title of this book was The World Is a Barrio. The idea was to pay homage to the band, WAR. The song, “The World Is a Ghetto” inspired me to see the world differently. It encouraged me to see the world beyond the one I lived in. And, the world I was raised in was one of gangs, sex, drugs, violence, poverty, systemic/structural racism, education inequity, health disparity, food insecurity, patriotism, and death. A ghetto. A barrio. For whatever reason, so many in the world want to forget this world existed and still does. Some cancel-culture cancels culture. I used the title for my second novel instead.
Then, I wanted to title the book, The Pinche Piñata. This title was a metaphor—a play on the expression, “Mi vida loca.” It was the original title of my second novel. I shopped the manuscript back in 2011. No one was ready to publish a book that examined transgender identity development and gender dysphoria. No one wanted to watch a boy grow up in the barrio and survive his machismo family. Or, maybe it was because less than 10 percent of the fiction-authors published are people of color.
The meaning of the title, The Pinche Piñata, was intended to describe how my life felt. I have been a piñata. Life was the stick. That stick beat me again and again until I finally broke. And, that was when all the good stuff came pouring out—everyone ran up to take a piece. However, I felt uncomfortable cursing every time I told someone the title. It is not something I do very often. So, I called my daughter. She says, “Dad, your work is about the damage of being nurtured in an environment of toxic masculinity.” She says, “How about, Toxic Masculinity?”
Another proud-dad moment. Of course . . . It was not life I survived, you survived, he survived, she survived, they survived, we survived. It was toxic masculinity. This book is a collection of poems based upon the lives of those that I have grieved, loved, feared, respected, and survived.
A young boy first discovers firearms by the side of his abuelito, sees violence first hand in a childhood home while dreaming closets to be portals only to apologize as an adult. As a young man he is caged alongside more young men, just like him, contemplating their own guilt. An abuelita in a crowded home of extended family prepares dinner to the specification of his conspiracy obsessed tio. As a grown man now, he sits in traffic, watching his fellow motorists attempt to capture selfies with a possible freeway suicide.
Fernando Albert Salinas's collection Toxic Masculinity is a rough book. These are poems that pull no punches. In the case of Salinas the phrase "brutal honesty" falls woefully short. Despite these scenes of cruelty, apathy and the pain we inflict upon each other for reasons often unknown to ourselves. At the center of this incredible work there is no malice. There is only a refusal to lie. And in that refusal Salinas captures our real faces in all our faults, in all our rages and stupors and yes our deep desire to do better.
This collection is an unwavering mirror, challenging and painful as it may be.
― Matt Sedillo, author of Mowing Leaves of Grass
Fernando Albert Salinas is a damn fine poet and a mensch, definitely a bro--feo, fuerte, y formal. What comes out in his poems is brazen and fearless and sometimes tough to read. Perhaps it's what makes him the incredible workshop teacher of students, of kids. Perhaps it's why I have to take a long walk after reading his work.
― Ricardo Means Ybarra. Malibu, CA Poet Laureate
Toxic Masculinity is a poetic memoir with jagged edges that explores the transitive natures of masculinity, violence, and the prismatic ways they intersect. Fernando Salinas is a modern-day Chicano Virgil, guiding his reader through the nine circles of a Los Angeles barrio. His poems bear witness, bleed, throb like a bruise against the page, and examine the poisons we are taught to drink as boys & as men."
― Brennan DeFrisco, author of A Heart WIth No Scars