A fierce and gentle spirit
(Editors note: The following is a book review by Cheryl Caesar of the book, “Pull Up a Chair by Tari Muñiz” published by Tari Muñiz and distributed by Goldenrod Publications.
Tari Muñiz is a fierce and gentle spirit.
I met her in 2018, at my first open mic at the Lansing Poetry Room. She sat next to me, a small, white-haired woman with big glasses. Then she got up and read “Fucking Pig Fuckers,” beginning “No offense to actual pigs / Fucking Pigs who are Fuckers” and ending, “”Too fucking stupid to know / We are taking them down.”
I came to know her as a fellow board member of the Lansing Poetry Club, welcoming new faces at LPC’s monthly readings as she had done for me. I heard her stand up and read “Choice”:
“Maybe I was raped
Maybe not
I had one
Maybe to do otherwise would have killed me
Maybe not
I had one
Maybe I was young poor scared overwhelmed alone
Maybe not
I had one [...]”
Fourteen stanzas of maybes, and the women in the audience murmuring assents as they recognized themselves, and gasping before applauding at the ending:
“I had one
The rest of the story
Is none of your fucking business”
I heard her recite with the feminist spoken-word group, Voices of the Revolution: as Tari calls them, the “stunning sisterhood.” Her fierce resistance and commitment to social justice are always apparent, through her poems about “family, feminism, queerness, spirituality, and identity [...] misogyny, racism and homophobia” (back cover). But her anger never drowns out her gentleness and love. The book’s Prologue, “A Gardener,” concludes:
“I feed the people I love. I feel the sunshine as well as their hands on my back in the garden.”
I have felt Tari’s soothing hand, literally as well as literarily. In 2024, she sat next to me at the memorial service for the daughter of a fellow poet and LPC Board member, lost to suicide. Just when I was about to break down, Tari felt it and reached for my hand. Her touch was as soft as the peonies that filled the church. In “Curl,” Tari writes to her partner: “here, in the space of vulnerability / We create haven.”
Tari’s collection is such a haven. It holds a space for our anger, our righteous indignation, within its gentle lovingkindness. If you love Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni or Maya Angelou, or their younger counterparts, I invite you to pull up a chair and sample the feast.
Tari Muñiz is a Lesbian Latina Disabled poet, performer, and producer. She is a founding member of Two Broads and a Butch productions and Voices of the Revolution, a feminist spoken word collective. Her poetry and essays cover the span of topics from gardening to radical justice. Her work has been published in Voices of the Revolution – Poems from the Resisterhood, Sinister Wisdom, The East Lansing Art Festival Poetry Journal, My Secret Lansing, The Lansing City Pulse, Let’s Go!, The New Citizen’s Press, and obscure feminist presses that her bring her joy. She is a regular at local open mics.
Tari’s superhero name is Big Mama.
Cheryl Caesar is an ex- expatriate, having lived in Europe for 25 years before returning to her native Michigan. She teaches writing at Michigan State University, and serves as president of the Michigan College English Association. Her chapbook of protest poetry Flatman is available from Amazon, and her poems and artwork appear in both volumes ofWords across the Water (Fractal Edge Press). In 2024, she won first prize for prose in the My Secret Lansing contest sponsored by the Lansing Arts Council.