Human Cicada is the latest collection by veterano poet Carlos Cumpian, who has long been a prominent fixture on the Chicago poetry scene. The book is divided into three titled sections: Travelers Without Maps, Almost Invisible Talents, and Heroics and Misery Cults. While the sections offer a subtle organizing logic to the work, the individual pieces range across memories, experiences and observations that span the author's life.
"Your racing neighbors" relives how quickly an innocent footrace between kids could turn into a nearly fatal encounter with KKK-claiming assailants pissed off about brown trespassers on their white, manicured lawn. "Headed to Work" renders the socio-economic intricacies of a post-automobile-collision negotiation over who's gonna pay for the damage. "I do my working out in a Grunge Gym" offers a snapshot of the speaker's gritty exercise space, which serves up a diverse array of people before a backdrop of a mechanic's slop sink, a broken clock, a toilet hole, ceiling fans instead of air conditioning, kettlebells and, lastly, gangsters keeping watch from across the street.
Cumpian deftly covers a vast array of subject matter, shifting from violence to tenderness, assertiveness to playfulness in what appears to be an almost effortless flow. This versatility, however, is the hard earned craftsmanship of a master storyteller. There is a consistent musicality to many of the poems that comprise the book, whether it pulses in the form of a snapshot, lyric poem like "Metzli Tochtli" or an unfolding, narrative piece like "Homage: He Didn't Stop Singing". Ultimately, Human Cicada serves as a kind of spirit guide that lifts the reader from past on into present visions, all the while revealing to us our intersections with the starlings and the moon, the wounded and the healed.
