Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader
Writer and engineer Tara Isabel Zambrano debuted with her flash and short story collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations from OKAY Donkey Press in 2020. Her second collection Ruined a Little When We Are Born (Dzanc Books, October 2024) arrives swathed in sensuous details—the food, clothing, customs, culture, and gods of India—and sprinkled with the extraordinary and the unusual, all to describe the otherwise most indescribable of human characteristics: emotions and feelings.
The sensuality of her writing is—perhaps unsurprisingly, yet it is a rare quality—especially striking in her depictions of sex, the before and the after, along with the manifestation of sexual longing, even if alone or in a doctor’s office. “OB-GYNs I Loved (in Random Order)” turns poignant, leading the reader to an unexpected place and to the inescapable conclusion that emotions are the binding agents of the physical, and that the yearning is toward replicating that first real connection. In “Milky-Eyed Orgasm Swallows Me Whole” the author, through her first-person narrator—a daughter noting that her parents no longer have sex—fearlessly depicts the embodiment of what can only be called a beloved.
“Your heart can only take so much of love,” she explains. “I must protect you from yourself.” The light around us grows frail. She inches towards me; her face looks blurry up close. “Everything is clearer after you are done with me,” she whispers, tongues my ear. I feel butterflies rise up my spine. (76)
From the viewpoint of daughters, mothers are scrutinized as sexual beings, whether as partners of their husbands, deceased or alive, or as widows disappointed by men who raise their hopes then leave them for younger women of child-bearing age. As their mothers ache, the daughters, maturing though still young, develop new understandings.
Other daughters, without mothers for an example or with mothers who don’t understand, face their own desires with sexual partners who are engaged to other young women. The daughters attend the couples’ arranged weddings and leave parties with men they don’t love. Again, the sex is furtive, but this time for different unarticulated reasons, including the flaunting of their agency.
Daughters of fathers who go outside the original family unit to procure male offspring are confronted with both the mundane and magical effects of taking care of a younger person. Whether they feel maternal or not is somewhat irrelevant, as how being faced with a human being more naïve than they are is what breaks into their feelings.
Zambrano occasionally inhabits a male voice, a standout being the narrator who cannot rid his mind of the sight of a distressed man on a raft in “Maui.” In two pages the vacationer is consumed by his vision, until he himself is in a precarious position. As with “OB-GYNs I Loved (in Random Order),” the reader is compelled to return to the story’s first sentence, though here it’s not poignancy that leads to the compulsion but being caught in an endless loop.
In the title story daughters announce that “the monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger.” (168) The daughters are jealous, afraid of losing their mother, and the day after their brother’s birth vie for her attention with actions that deliver pain and laughter. “Dirt crumbles on our limbs and lips. We tuck it at the edge of our jaws, where our fangs are, pretending we cannot hurt anyone.” (169) Unlike in this flash, the usual point-of-view is not plural; but the collection as a whole, fittingly named after this almost-mythic tale, has the feel of an overarching communal voice, one that arises from suffering and with triumph.
Ruined a Little When We Are Born by Tara Isabel Zambrano
Dzanc Books, 2024, 192 pages., $17.95 [paperback]
ISBN: 9780983740582
Teresa Tumminello Brader is the author of Letting in Air and Light, a work of hybrid memoir/fiction from Belle Point Press. Her short-story collection Secret Keepers is forthcoming in March 2025 from the same publisher. Her stories, essays, poetry and reviews can be found in print anthologies and at various online literary sites, such as Bulb Culture Collective, Deep South, Halfway Down the Stairs, and MER.