Book Review: Mix-Mix
- Jun 15, 2025
- 3 min read
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
Nevada poet and essayist Dani Putney takes documentary poetics to a new level in Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025). By documentary, I mean a certain relation to historical reality, which is not to say this is historical poetry. It is vivid poetry — lyrical, cynical, ironic, touching, sexy. Because the poet approaches history with all senses and emotions aflame, with heart beating beneath the inquiry, letting itself be known, the result is multifaceted — not merely history, but the experience of history at the poetic level, the level of the soul.
Soul is a silly word, but to say Dani writes with soul is not silly. Full disclosure, Dani is a trampset contributor and a friend, someone who has slept on my couch. Dani is a nonbinary Filipinx writer with a white father who, through mail correspondence, wed a Filipina mother. In this collection, the poet examines this mixed heritage and what it means in a world still compromised by the trappings of empire.
“I’m the ultimate possibility, by which
I mean I wither beside my family tree,
hoping an apple or a coconut cracks
my skull to make me real. Can you
help me understand why I’m alive?”
These lines come from “First Date,” in which the poet compares their heritage to “origin manifest / in your US history text book,” revealing the poet’s alienation in the white-washed myth of America.
In “Mosquitoes,” the poet elicits a defiant kind of despair:
“In this upside-down,
I float above grandfather clocks,
white picket fences, baby-faced humanity:
no future for me.”
In “Nature in Technicolor,” even Nevada, our shared landscape of mountains and deserts, is not enough to equalize:
“Muir & Roosevelt didn’t
see me, or me with you, at the peak
of America’s wilderness.”
But it is this sense of alienation that drives these 50 poems and an essay divided by region and theme. The collection includes excerpts, sometimes reformulated, from Asian Romance Guide to Marriage by Correspondence, which provide context to the relationship of the poet’s parents, and descriptions from Ancestry DNA. “List of Illustrations” links descriptive captions for different artwork, an archipelago of images from the National Museum of Anthropology/Ethnology in Manila to the Nevada Historical Society. The images themselves are blank or redacted, leaving questions about the mechanisms of curation and exhibition.
If the poet feels like an exhibit, separated from mainstream society by the facts of their identity, it is their queerness that connects them to the living world: an erotic, subversive force that bends American cliche and social hierarchies toward a new inheritance, a world being created on the page, fresh and pulsing with discovery. This is how the poet explores the legacy of Walt Whitman and their own father in their brilliant essay “Multitude” — “I contemplate sweet flags dying at the edge of my future grave” — and how the poet declares, in “Anti-mimetic Body,” that “Riding denim / is how I evolve into myself, / a high most never reach.”
It is true Dani, now a doctor in the English language, brings intellectual rigor to their personal cultural excavation, finding layers beneath the historical picture we’re presented. It is also true that Dani can write as fiercely and rawly and lyrically as anyone. The marriage of these two traits is what makes their work fascinating and electrifying. Mix-Mix is a beautiful book that takes nothing about beauty for granted. Reading it, I hear the voice of the future.
