Puerto Rican Poet Loretta Collins Klobah / Oil Painting on Front Cover: Ángel Plenero by Samuel Lind
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018)

My Poetry Corner April 2025 features the title poem from the poetry collection Ricantations (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) by Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah. Born in Merced, California, she earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She spent four of the nine years of her doctoral study in Jamaica (Caribbean) and West Indian neighborhoods of Toronto (Canada) and London (UK). Since the late 1990s, she lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.

Growing up in an English and Spanish working-class household has influenced Klobah’s style of blending Spanish and English in her work. Her mother had Spanish and Scottish heritage, her father Cherokee and Irish. Her Mexican American godparents taught her Spanish, widely spoken in Merced where she grew up. The title of her collection Ricantations appears to be a blend of these two languages.

Klobah began writing poetry in primary school as a way of processing life and engaging with the world. At eighteen years, on becoming part of the active poetry community in Fresno, California, she began receiving serious mentoring from former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and other award-winning poets.

“I don’t write love poetry, and I don’t rhyme,” Klobah told Trinidadian poet Andre Bagoo during a 2012 interview for the Caribbean Beat magazine, following the release of her award-winning debut poetry collection. “I write because I want to communicate with readers in a way that matters, makes an impact, or makes some kind of beneficial difference in the reader’s thoughts and in the society.”

Klobah’s second collection of poems in Ricantations portrays the harsh realities of life in Puerto Rico’s colonized society, ransacked by debt, mass migrations, narcoculture, gender violence, and hurricanes. The featured title poem describes the poet’s shared trauma of surviving Hurricane Maria that struck the Caribbean island on September 20, 2017. The strongest storm to impact the island in nearly ninety years, Maria caused a major humanitarian crisis for survivors. It not only flattened neighborhoods but also destroyed the island’s power grid and telecommunications network. An estimated 2,982 people lost their lives.

“The entire island looked like an atomic bomb had been dropped on it,” Klobah told Vahni Capildeo during their 2018 interview for PN Review 242. “When I first was able to get out of my house and into the streets, my thought was that this island can never recover from this destruction.”

Klobah’s description of Hurricane Maria and its aftermath is surreal, at times hallucinatory. In the first five stanzas of her long narrative poem, she also bears witness to the storm’s assault on non-human life (p. 99):

Hurricane Maria wheeled over the sea,
a day away from upending and crushing cars,
prying roofs, plucking up electrical poles,
cracking trees to the stub,
flooding plantain fields of Yabucoa.

Our avocado trees, roots rumbling,
threw down their green pears all at once,
so that when they were broken and uptorn,
their stones would tap into soil.

[Yabucoa is a town and municipality in the southeastern region of Puerto Rico.]

In the fourth stanza (p. 99), peeping through the poet’s louvred bedroom window, we see an enormous old iguana, 5 or 6 feet / from nose to tail. He sat at the top corner / of my vine-covered fence, / bowing down chain-link with his weight. // In his heavy-lidded / green eyes, what knowledge? I was in the cabin / of a ship, and he was both captain and figurehead, / an ancient dragon sailing us into a sky bomb.

The aftermath of Boombox Maria unreels in stanzas six to thirteen (pp. 100-101):

When neighbors cleared trees and debris,
we went out onto the swamped streets.
Ceiba trees’ massive trunks pulled up like radishes.
Piñones erased by sand, beach huts gone.
Signs and stop-lights curled wreckage – 
Cemetery wall strewn along the hotel strip.

Young iguanas, ousted from shorn treetops,
ran into the road and were run over.
Honey bees flew into our homes,
their hives and colonies carried away,
surviving plants disrobed of flowers and fruit.
Bats whisked overhead at twilight.

Without shelter, families slept on sodden couches, / in bathrooms, on patios, in leaking garages. Without available medical assistance, the poet allowed her diabetic daughter to evacuate the island. Her own ulcerated legs dripped sap and pus. With three neighbors, she traded food, solar lights, and small bags of ice. / We bathed in bowls and hand-washed clothes / with tainted water contaminated with animal carcasses and sewage.

“Neighbors got to know each other because we all needed mutual help,” Klobah told Vahni Capildeo. “To some degree, islands helped each other out. However, the aid response of the colonial countries that gained their wealth through using our islands as slave plantations, and still benefit from captive markets and disaster capitalism, was far from adequate. This necessary aid and infrastructural strengthening should be considered an ethical imperative and a form of reparations.”

In the closing two stanzas (14 and 15), Klobah reflects on lessons learned from their shared trauma (p. 101):

Nothing now is normal
though remaining trees rush to green up
and flower, dogs bark, and the sea still
waves its bacterial flag over the shores.
I hear quarrelling macaws and parakeets.
Ay Le Lo Lai songs move us,
but not to full tenderness.

Still, we feel new incantations of something
primal in us, allied by our hurricane grief,
disordered, but sentient of how we are related, neighbors,
iguanas, honey bees, bats, birds, trees, islands.
What is possible now? Can we do some things
differently now? 

Over seven years have passed since Hurricane Maria pulverized America’s Caribbean Island territory of Puerto Rico. Our climate change-denial president who sought to withhold about US$20 billion in federal hurricane relief funds for the island is, once again, at the helm. The questions posed in the ending of “Ricantations” are a call to action. “Writers, if not politicians, need to imagine and voice the substantial changes that we urgently need to make,” Klobah told Vahni Capildeo.

With its theme Our Power, Our Planet on Earth Day 2025, observed on April 22nd, the emphasis is on people power as the driving force behind the global transition to renewal energy sources. According to their release: “It’s the collective voice of concerned citizens that pushes governments and corporations to make bold commitments and take decisive action.” Join me in responding to their call to “embrace a powerful, renewable future. It’s Our Power, it’s Our Planet.”

To read an excerpt (stanzas 1, 4, 7, 9, 14 & 15) of the featured poem “Ricantations” and learn more about the work of Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah, go to my Poetry Corner April 2025.