Burn Me Back by Peggy Robles-Alvarado
Reviewed by Noel Quiñones
Fire Dancing: A Review of Burn Me Back by Peggy Robles-Alvarado
by Noel Quiñones
Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s third poetry collection Burn Me Back (Four Way Books, 2025) confronts the slow, compounding burns of intergenerational sexism, alcoholism, xenophobia, and sexual assault. Shaped by a father’s death and a mother’s antagonism, Robles-Alvarado’s speaker interrogates the consequences of storytelling for women trapped within patriarchy as well as the complex grief for the men who perpetuate and benefit from it. In Burn Me Back, storytelling is not sitting around a firepit. It is a sprawling fire dance—unpredictable, beautiful, wounding, and warming.
As the title suggests, the speaker of these poems not only shares stories but sits “in the quiet brutality” of them. She is the “receiver of the incomprehensible / and the abnormal, / trying to use the unscientific / and the un-western” to comprehend trauma. For doing so she is not just burned repeatedly, but inevitably seeks the burning—of remembering, of writing, of storytelling. Burn Me Back is the work of a veteran storyteller, questioning, grappling, and fumbling with the nature of story itself, asking the reader: “¿If a story is told in an empty campo, does it make a sound? / ¿If my story becomes an empty forest, should I make a sound?” Robles-Alvarado utilizes two powerful approaches to carry the weight of these questions: a Greek chorus and Lucumi, Espiritismo & Catholic religious practices, each remixed within an urban, diasporic context. Robles-Alvarado combats a history of women’s forced acquiescence by renaming “what [men] wanted to call silence—explosive.” Burn Me Back shatters our preconceived notions of orality to better hold the complexities of “all the women throughout history / who have fought to break the sound barrier, / who have mended their broken tongues.”
Robles-Alvarado ingeniously uses a Caribbean immigrant chorus of Tías to speak around, through, and against relationships, assault, and memory. We are introduced to these Tías in “Dolores, Altagracia, Carmen, and María:”
Abuelo’s lust detached from the consequences of too many mouths
…The same four names,
revolving biblical placeholders, awaiting the opulent surnames
that would make
having all these girls
worth it.
These girls are seen as interchangeable, useless even in their father’s eyes without a man’s last name to make them “biblical.” This disregard is furthered in “Learning To Cook:”
Tía Leticia, Tía Luz, Tía Altagracia, and Tía Dolores
all came to New York by marrying viejos verdes.
Their late teens and early twenties spent learning
to fake orgasms at night and smiles during the day.
“Viejos verdes” are older men with Visas, greencards, or even citizenship who bring young women over to the states. Taught from birth to mask around men, they inevitably teach these masks to their daughters and nieces. In “When Tía Teaches You How To Keep Your Man,” they learn “mothering was as foreign as English, but she continued / to summon her womb.” In “In Leticia’s Kitchen Drawer” they learn of the “film from an outdated Kodak she won’t develop to avoid / seeing the exact day she lost her looks on his knuckles.” In “Nicknames Tía Gave Her Nieces When We Reminded Her of Her Youth,” they learn to not believe in “half-answered prayers / that looked too much like their fathers.” In “How I Learned Not To Smile,” they learn “iCuidado, que los perros andan sueltos!...posing for photos only the men wanted to take.” These are terrifying and necessary lessons of survival. Yet the longer these masks are worn, the more normalized the silence—the harder they are to reject.
Robles-Alvarado’s speaker, raised by these women, surrounded by these masks, defies these norms from a very young age. In “When I Became La Promesa,” we learn of the Lucumi, Espiritismo & Catholic religious practices the speaker’s family did when hardship came:
Unsullied and unaware, cousin Mari pissed about having to dress in
green and red for twenty-one days to keep Tío Pablo out of jail. Luisito
scratching at an anklet made of braided born silk to help Tía Lorna find
a new job, and my hair not to be cut until Papi’s tumor was removed.
Similar to the Tía chorus, the generational split here is palpable. Mari, Luisito, and the speaker are annoyed by these parental requirements, questioning their legitimacy. This makes the speaker’s decision to take her “older brother’s clippers, [run] thirsty blades across [her] right temple” that much more powerful, a sign of her agency as a young woman. This defiance is solidified in the closing line of the poem: “My unsteady hand: a fist in the face of God.” This “God” represents both the law of her family and her father himself. The speaker has listened to the stories of women, suffered the trauma and assault of men, and so she stands against it, even risking her father’s life to do so.
This defiance, to “juxtapose the mantra / fed to me by inferior boys,” “to chant, to dance, to dream in free verse, / to bless and to curse,” is celebrated in the face of all those that tried to silence the speaker. Yet, this makes it that much more heart wrenching when we see the speaker silenced by her own mother.
Across multiple poems, the mother is defined by her antagonism to storytelling. The speaker writes, “[She] reminds me I am daughter first / Storyteller second / Poet only when she deems me so” and “she warned me her stories are hers & no one else’s. / Says I didn’t earn her words.” Her mother is so afraid of the speaker’s ability that she forbids her from even visiting her father’s grave, stating “[I] know bones, too, can be read.”
The speaker ultimately respects her mother’s wishes, talking around, through, and against the stories of her parents. She engages in a different level of vulnerability with her parents than with the stories of her Tías and Tíos, while at the same time mirroring their history of silencing. This is paralleled by the speaker’s complicated grappling with her father’s death. Robles-Alvarado writes in the title poem:
Please,
burn me back.
Bring him closer.
Set a blaze.
so I can remember his warmth.
I’ve been told too much fire can hurt,
but this agony be a firewall I’m willing to breach.
The speaker yearns for her father, even knowing the agony he’s caused her and her mother. The words “firewall” and “breach” also convey the strength and commitment it would take to get him back. Yet, she wants his warmth again even though the stories she’s been told say “too much fire can hurt.”
The speaker’s handling of her parents’ stories versus her Tías and Tíos’ stories speak to the complexities of grief and silence when those we love most fail and restrict us. Robles-Alvarado complicates the speaker’s commitment to proud, loud capital (T) truth by forcing her to interrogate the very nature of storytelling. Every truth comes at a cost; every memory has the potential to burn. It is in this fire dance that Robles-Alvarado reckons with the ways we are tethered to each other, burning and glowing, tender and numb, harshly warmed.
by Noel Quiñones
Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s third poetry collection Burn Me Back (Four Way Books, 2025) confronts the slow, compounding burns of intergenerational sexism, alcoholism, xenophobia, and sexual assault. Shaped by a father’s death and a mother’s antagonism, Robles-Alvarado’s speaker interrogates the consequences of storytelling for women trapped within patriarchy as well as the complex grief for the men who perpetuate and benefit from it. In Burn Me Back, storytelling is not sitting around a firepit. It is a sprawling fire dance—unpredictable, beautiful, wounding, and warming.
As the title suggests, the speaker of these poems not only shares stories but sits “in the quiet brutality” of them. She is the “receiver of the incomprehensible / and the abnormal, / trying to use the unscientific / and the un-western” to comprehend trauma. For doing so she is not just burned repeatedly, but inevitably seeks the burning—of remembering, of writing, of storytelling. Burn Me Back is the work of a veteran storyteller, questioning, grappling, and fumbling with the nature of story itself, asking the reader: “¿If a story is told in an empty campo, does it make a sound? / ¿If my story becomes an empty forest, should I make a sound?” Robles-Alvarado utilizes two powerful approaches to carry the weight of these questions: a Greek chorus and Lucumi, Espiritismo & Catholic religious practices, each remixed within an urban, diasporic context. Robles-Alvarado combats a history of women’s forced acquiescence by renaming “what [men] wanted to call silence—explosive.” Burn Me Back shatters our preconceived notions of orality to better hold the complexities of “all the women throughout history / who have fought to break the sound barrier, / who have mended their broken tongues.”
Robles-Alvarado ingeniously uses a Caribbean immigrant chorus of Tías to speak around, through, and against relationships, assault, and memory. We are introduced to these Tías in “Dolores, Altagracia, Carmen, and María:”
Abuelo’s lust detached from the consequences of too many mouths
…The same four names,
revolving biblical placeholders, awaiting the opulent surnames
that would make
having all these girls
worth it.
These girls are seen as interchangeable, useless even in their father’s eyes without a man’s last name to make them “biblical.” This disregard is furthered in “Learning To Cook:”
Tía Leticia, Tía Luz, Tía Altagracia, and Tía Dolores
all came to New York by marrying viejos verdes.
Their late teens and early twenties spent learning
to fake orgasms at night and smiles during the day.
“Viejos verdes” are older men with Visas, greencards, or even citizenship who bring young women over to the states. Taught from birth to mask around men, they inevitably teach these masks to their daughters and nieces. In “When Tía Teaches You How To Keep Your Man,” they learn “mothering was as foreign as English, but she continued / to summon her womb.” In “In Leticia’s Kitchen Drawer” they learn of the “film from an outdated Kodak she won’t develop to avoid / seeing the exact day she lost her looks on his knuckles.” In “Nicknames Tía Gave Her Nieces When We Reminded Her of Her Youth,” they learn to not believe in “half-answered prayers / that looked too much like their fathers.” In “How I Learned Not To Smile,” they learn “iCuidado, que los perros andan sueltos!...posing for photos only the men wanted to take.” These are terrifying and necessary lessons of survival. Yet the longer these masks are worn, the more normalized the silence—the harder they are to reject.
Robles-Alvarado’s speaker, raised by these women, surrounded by these masks, defies these norms from a very young age. In “When I Became La Promesa,” we learn of the Lucumi, Espiritismo & Catholic religious practices the speaker’s family did when hardship came:
Unsullied and unaware, cousin Mari pissed about having to dress in
green and red for twenty-one days to keep Tío Pablo out of jail. Luisito
scratching at an anklet made of braided born silk to help Tía Lorna find
a new job, and my hair not to be cut until Papi’s tumor was removed.
Similar to the Tía chorus, the generational split here is palpable. Mari, Luisito, and the speaker are annoyed by these parental requirements, questioning their legitimacy. This makes the speaker’s decision to take her “older brother’s clippers, [run] thirsty blades across [her] right temple” that much more powerful, a sign of her agency as a young woman. This defiance is solidified in the closing line of the poem: “My unsteady hand: a fist in the face of God.” This “God” represents both the law of her family and her father himself. The speaker has listened to the stories of women, suffered the trauma and assault of men, and so she stands against it, even risking her father’s life to do so.
This defiance, to “juxtapose the mantra / fed to me by inferior boys,” “to chant, to dance, to dream in free verse, / to bless and to curse,” is celebrated in the face of all those that tried to silence the speaker. Yet, this makes it that much more heart wrenching when we see the speaker silenced by her own mother.
Across multiple poems, the mother is defined by her antagonism to storytelling. The speaker writes, “[She] reminds me I am daughter first / Storyteller second / Poet only when she deems me so” and “she warned me her stories are hers & no one else’s. / Says I didn’t earn her words.” Her mother is so afraid of the speaker’s ability that she forbids her from even visiting her father’s grave, stating “[I] know bones, too, can be read.”
The speaker ultimately respects her mother’s wishes, talking around, through, and against the stories of her parents. She engages in a different level of vulnerability with her parents than with the stories of her Tías and Tíos, while at the same time mirroring their history of silencing. This is paralleled by the speaker’s complicated grappling with her father’s death. Robles-Alvarado writes in the title poem:
Please,
burn me back.
Bring him closer.
Set a blaze.
so I can remember his warmth.
I’ve been told too much fire can hurt,
but this agony be a firewall I’m willing to breach.
The speaker yearns for her father, even knowing the agony he’s caused her and her mother. The words “firewall” and “breach” also convey the strength and commitment it would take to get him back. Yet, she wants his warmth again even though the stories she’s been told say “too much fire can hurt.”
The speaker’s handling of her parents’ stories versus her Tías and Tíos’ stories speak to the complexities of grief and silence when those we love most fail and restrict us. Robles-Alvarado complicates the speaker’s commitment to proud, loud capital (T) truth by forcing her to interrogate the very nature of storytelling. Every truth comes at a cost; every memory has the potential to burn. It is in this fire dance that Robles-Alvarado reckons with the ways we are tethered to each other, burning and glowing, tender and numb, harshly warmed.
Noel Quiñones is a Puerto Rican writer, educator, and community organizer from the Bronx. He’s received fellowships from Poets House, the Poetry Foundation, CantoMundo, Tin House, and SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts). His work has been published in POETRY, the Latin American Review, Kweli Journal, and is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly and Gulf Coast. He is the founder of Project X, a Bronx-based arts organization, a poetry book reviewer for Muzzle Magazine, and a current M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi. Follow him online @noelpquinones.