Grenade in Mouth by Miyo Vestrini: Summary and Review

Image taken from Goodreads.

Grenade in Mouth is a posthumous collection of poems by Miyo Vestrini translated from their original Spanish to English. The collection as a whole romanticizes death as a means of immortalizing a person, allowing them to be who they are in their final moments for “eternity.” The real antagonist in the book is aging and, therefore, changing. The speaker in these poems is searching for a constant, something to hold onto. When the writer isn’t exploring death and dying, she relays the rocky parts of her relationships, referring to her lover as a rat or being rat-faced (e.g., “The Sorrow”), the eater of a body not a life, which serves the main subject matter of finding consistency and self-worth in death.

Themes in the collection include feeling out of control or acted upon by external forces, mourning the impermanence of life and reclaiming control of life through death. Motifs in the collection include eating (in bed—as a euphemism for depression—referencing vegetables in particular), water (usually in reference to a “watery grave”), stains (in reference to being sloppy, to bleeding, to the body as a “disgusting” machine), rats (in reference to a lover) and, most of all, anger and spite.

In many poems, the speaker hopes for a violent, “angry death. / A death as offensive / as those [they’ve] offended” (“Brave Citizen”), presumably so that they can be remembered by those left behind more easily, allowing them to live on in their present state forever, however long that will be. Likewise, the language used in these poems is graphic, a shock to the system, which lets them be remembered and immortalized in the same “violent” way (e.g., “your virgin cunt” in “One Day of the Week I,” “… to turn eighteen / and snort all the coke you want. / And puke on your mother’s china …” in “Caress,” “when you start to sweat / or when the prostate hurts” in “Beatriz,” etc.). The writer uses phrasing that is not lyrical, not poetic, but that is still surprising, which by definition makes these lined works poetry.