Review by Melanie McGehee
In her poetry collection Material, Ana María Caballero excavates fear, yearning, and frustration from the ordinary material of family life. Children and husbands, bodies and books, household routines and memories bring a strange urgency to her attempts at understanding. The poems build through accumulation, and their connections are sometimes apparent and sometimes require the reader to linger.
“I live my life on a single street,” Caballero writes in “Viviparous.” Her son goes to school. She eats a dairy-free lunch. He comes home. The hours crawl toward night. The poem begins with an epigraph from Yusef Komunyakaa about determinism, and this repeating pattern of domestic life does initially feel determined. Yet Caballero does not remain here. She shares that she wants more children but cannot recreate what she calls the “uterus vibe.” Her face has developed clefts; her breasts have shrunk. By the poem’s end, the routines of motherhood have accumulated into questions about creation, aging, and death, and Caballero admits, “I nourish my body with keyboard computer screen love.”
Caballero equates writing with physical creation. The text becomes another thing her body can produce.
That physicality of text becomes more pronounced in “Ways to Misspell Obsidian,” the only poem in a section Caballero labels “MEMOIR.” Here, accumulation becomes almost dizzying. Caballero moves between memories of her childhood friend Juan, her fears of dogs and horses, ayahuasca and obsidian, her husband and children, books and Joan Didion. She considers things that are almost, but not quite, the same. Onyx is not obsidian. To pretend is not necessarily to lie. Wanting a cat is different from wanting the idea of a cat.
Through these associations, Caballero searches for ways to understand fear. Some fears are immediate and sudden; others are, as she describes them, “fathomless.” Juan’s death belongs to the latter. So does the possibility of losing her own child after her son drinks nail polish remover while she is putting his baby sister to bed. Caballero turns to ayahuasca, crystals, books, science, and even a witch for ways to make sense of what frightens her.
Ultimately, she turns to words. Juan’s sister tells Caballero that reading her writing allows her to feel close to her brother. Caballero considers Joan Didion and the personal essay, and near the poem’s end describes the text itself as an “equal and opposite reaction” to the terrifying physical event involving her son. The answer to the vomit and fear is “this piece of physical text.”
Writing cannot undo what happened. But it can give fear a form. The text becomes something Caballero can make from what she cannot control.
“The Words of It” offers a gentler accumulation. Caballero delights in recognizing her son’s own pleasure in language, particularly when he identifies the words he enjoys as poetry. Here, words are not only Caballero’s means of working toward understanding; they are something she can watch her child discover for himself. When he notices a passage she has marked in a book describing God as both father and mother, language again opens beyond expected categories. But perhaps the greater pleasure of the poem is simpler: a mother who loves words realizes that her son loves them, too.
Elsewhere, she turns her attention more directly to gender and the expectations attached to female and male bodies, particularly inside the family unit. The collection holds these concerns, too, without insisting they be neatly resolved.
In this work of accumulation, Caballero gives us the stuff of a life and asks us to look again and again at what it contains. Words become a means of approaching what cannot otherwise be controlled. And the girl who once feared poetry is now a woman who reaches often for it to fathom all she fears.
Material by Ana Maria Caballero
Trio House Press, 2026, 104 pages, $18.00 [paper],
9781949487732
Melanie McGehee has an MFA in Creative Writing and loves leading online writing workshops, especially for women. She recently co-edited the anthology WRITE HOME: LETTERS TO A YOUNGER ME (Athenaeum Press, 2026). Find her at www.melaniemcghee.com