Book Reviews

MRR #513 • February 2026

ESTA BOCA ES MĺA Lupita Limón Corrales, translated by Alexia Veytia-Rubio

ESTA BOCA ES MĺA is a bilingual book of poems that are pointed toward faith in solidarity. Corrales’s poems tell stories about tenant struggle, misogyny, and acts of anti-imperialism—also about karaoke, romance, and comradeship. The book is illustrated with photographs from the neighborhoods in Los Angeles where the poems take place. Within many of these poems are snapshots of tenant nerve: A mother moves into a party supply store. A widow shakes her husband’s ashes along the doorway of their house that’s been put up for sale. Someone picks church roses and is admonished to hell by a neighbor—before a nun interjects that “The roses belong to everyone…” (Heaven’s Green Lawns)

Corrales works with LATU (Los Angeles Tenants Union), an organization that organizes tenants to fight evictions and build tenant associations. Tenant associations are formed around a building, a common landlord, or a neighborhood to organize strategically against harassment, neglected habitability issues, evictions, and displacement. Lupita is focused on language access across the organization.

These poems are wise to the long arc of hostility on inhospitable lands. “In this war against living, I take my position on the side of eternity” (Divinity’s Guests). Una Boca mentions many people whose strength rings through Corrales’s work: Leila Khaled, Emma Goldman, Daisy Zamora, Saint Teresa, and Saint Vibiana. The locus of these poems reach from Los Angeles to Gaza to Mexico, invoking the lineages of saints, poets, and anarchists engaged in class struggle against those who control “Bulldozers and fences [that] terrorize the poor”—and those “against children…olive trees…bakeries, libraries and poetry.” 

Her poems are romantic and spiritually salient, though grounded in material conditions: “Every time a laundromat closes / the property value goes up…” Her work addresses the imbalance between the prioritization of real estate and the quality of our lives. Her voice speaks with strength from a life-instinct within the tenant struggle, in line with her judgments: “…Even in hell the jasmine still blooms / and the sun shines on each of us / whether we deserve it or not” (Old Linens). 

The title ESTA BOCA ES MĺA refers to an incident where the author was banned from karaoke at a bowling alley. Alexia Veytia-Rubio translates: “I’m a conduit just like a mic. This mouth is mine/and it never stops screaming.” The night out is in celebration of solidarity: drinking palomas, a widower singing to his deceased wife, a friend smashing a glass in support when she is kicked out of the bar.

Corrales writes about working with the Mohawk Street Tenants Association in Echo Park, which successfully organized to legally ban “Renovictions.” Renovictions are a method of gentrification in which landlords displace their long-term tenants to remodel their properties and hike up rents. Corrales’s poem QUERUBIN/MOHAWK STREET is about helping Memo (a Mohawk Street tenant) fight an eviction after he is laid off from his job in a cherub factory that he had worked for decades. The poem contains both factory cherubs and angelic encounters. His daughter Lulu learns strategies for door-knocking at church and uses this skill to bring tenants together, sharing information about their housing situations with each other. Lulu asks a neighbor: “A quien le tendremos miedo, / si hay solo un juez?” Questions of materiality, privatization, and displacement become divine, angelic, and existential. The poem ends: “We pray to love the angels more / than we fear the devil. Then / we see the angels everywhere.” 

Strategizing against a common class enemy can breed resentment. Navigating the city’s bureaucracy—burnout, breeding malaise rent-free, like bitter fruit flies in the head. Yet these poems reignite our quicksilver and are not disheartened by the work.

All Roads Lead To Punk – BOOK + 7″ record set Genny Schorr

I thought all the stories had already been told, or at least endlessly circled, (like a clogged toilet) with regards to the early days of the LA underground music scene. But I was wrong. At that point in time, the early to mid ‘70s, punk wasn’t widely accepted as a thing to be, but Genny Schorr’s attitude and actions were entirely punk. Genny’s storytelling is laid out like an old telephone cord; wound into pliable circles that stretch and contract. While the narrative is linear, the chapters overlap and connect. Genny takes you back to the beginning, like the beginning for most of us, when a friend took you under their wing and she rolled you through her life of impulse with her, “why not me?” mindset that collided headfirst into right-place-right-time opportunity.

This book-and-record combo isn’t entirely unlike those from our youth. Remember the book and record sets that would beep to tell you when to turn the page? This one offers a more modern twist: sprinkled throughout the pages are QR codes that direct you to songs reflecting the recording sessions and stories written in the book. Beyond the drugs and the sexual encounters, including one threesome with someone from the JAM, this book leans into a deeper theme that’s often missing from other accounts of the era: lifelong friendships. There isn’t a song tied to the JAM sex, at least not explicitly, but there are songs where Genny has the BOYS(UK) as her backing band.

Filled with accounts surrounding friendships with the GO-GOs, the BANGLES, X and EXCENE, ALICE BAG, and many others, there are several unexpected turns in her life path. There’s the heartbreak of friendships falling apart, unbalanced love, and dreams dying. The book also captures the opposite of all that as well. I don’t want to spoil her story by melting it down to the juicy plops, but I do need to touch on the band she was (and is) part of, BACKSTAGE PASS. Genny’s band found themselves opening or headlining for what, by today’s standards, would be considered genre-defining bands, though at the time, they were simply friends and peers sharing the stage, like the WEIRDOS, ELVIS COSTELLO, WALL OF VOODOO, DEVO, and many others. BACKSTAGE PASS undeniably made a crater in the LA late ‘70s underground scene.

I’m only going to touch on the music dollops and leave some of the larger twists for you to discover on your own. Parts of the book mirror so many of us and our excitement while waiting for touring friends to come through town, to moving into adulthood and losing touch with those same friends. All Roads Lead to Punk is a twisting pothole ridden ride, made tolerable by kinship and astounding landscape that undoubtedly leads to the dead center of punk.

FROM THE BELLY Emmett Nahil

From the Belly is a wicked tense tale braided with fate, legacy, and wonder. The writer, Emmett Nahil, is a New Englander who cofounded a video game company called Perfect Garbage Studios. Nahil is a horror and speculative writer and artist. On the periphery of the writing is a historical, queer, and rhythmic atmosphere that bodes well for a soundtrack. Some of the songs on my list for this book are “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” by X, “Dreams” by DESCENDENTS, “The Ocean” by AGAINST ME! and “Search and Destroy” by the STOOGES. 

The outside cover is designed by Chris Shehan, a comic book artist with expertise in the horror genre. The art exposes the weird sensation the reader can glean of what it must be like to be on the ship as it transforms throughout the story. The visual pulls through what Nahil conveys through his protagonist: to be in this place, with this directive to kill whales is unsettling and destructive. The book is peppered with rich illustrations by Megan Llewallyn, a medical and comic book illustrator, which gives even more depth to the body horror and makes the most poignant and transitional scenes erupt from the page. 

Nahil’s story asks the question: What can one do when their past, present, and future all haunt them with the heart thumping pressure of inevitable death? Isaiah Chase, a crew member on a whaler ship named The Merciful navigates this question as the horrors persist and take over with each turn of the page. Isaiah stumbles through his journey in a haze. His surreal and dark dreams are something his father suffered with as well. Isaiah worries he’ll fall into the same traps his ancestors did. The book ponders: will he ever be able to understand his lineage? Does anyone? (As a human, this is something I ask myself often. Even if Isaiah did have all the answers of his father’s experience, could it be fully understood?)

The dangerous reality is that the profession of hunting whales puts all the characters at risk of fighting the vast sea and losing everything. Even without dreams, there could be a gnawing feeling that something just isn’t right onboard the ship as storm clouds for Isaiah and the crew approach from all directions. The most powerful and thrilling moment is when Isaiah collides with the namesake of the book, a man who is discovered in the belly of the whale. The crew discovers this still-alive man, and it stays a true pleasure for the reader each moment Isaiah draws near him. The man has explosive presence and control while being shrouded in mystery that causes apprehension in anyone who crosses his path. 

Isaiah and the man are drawn to each other. They want to save each other from their fates. The man may know it is foolish though, and says to Isaiah, “Men don’t change. Only grow to be more so who they always were under the skin.” As Isaiah continues to swallow down his reality with delusional optimism, a reality where he and everyone on the ship can survive, the mood aboard the ship shifts. The moody, salty, sea changes the crew and its captain from the inside out.

The connection between Isaiah and the man from the belly of the whale coupled with the atmosphere, are the best parts of the book. An aspect of the book that might frustrate a reader is the number of characters that are never known in depth. While it makes sense to have many crew members on a whaler ship, the use of names can get confusing and distracting when the biggest known significance of each character is what their role on the ship is (possibly, in part thanks to the capitalistic society for the brainwashing of people’s worth being in their work) without many grounding characteristics to differentiate them.

Another nitpicky gripe is the number of adverbs (many writing mentors harp about avoiding adverbs). The descriptions sometimes lose their flow, and it causes a neurotic urge to edit them out of the copy in my hands. “…Isaiah had the sense that he was telling him half-truths, that there was something slightly off kilter. But this was the first time he seemed truly contrite…” Though that could just be me, and despite these things, I do think the man in the whale redeems the glares of the -lys and keeps a hook into the reader to want to see the scary yet juicy connection play out.