Book Review: Salamat sa Intersectionality

Scott Neuffer

Salamat sa Intersectionality by Dani Putney, Okay Donkey Press, 2021

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

In their debut poetry collection, Dani Putney renders the American West new. Blending a philosophical, musing mind with a deep love for concrete particulars in a landscape — namely the geology and flora of Nevada — Salamat sa Intersectionality offers an utterly beautiful and transformative revision of the strange place we both call home. Divided into three sections, these poems are both gritty and sexy, scarily smart, and propulsive in their motion towards the new. But before we go racing off into the sunset, let me back up a bit.

Dani is a fellow Nevadan. A queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, neurodivergent writer living in the driest, wildest state in America. I know the ethos of this state. The prospector’s swinging pickaxe. The gruff men with silver in their eyes. The all-night casinos ringing in the dark. The crestfallen placing their last bet on the table. These poems both capture and challenge the mythos of the American West. Starting to write this review, I initially turned to Walter Van Tilburg Clark because he’s held up as the greatest Nevada writer. I wanted to find parallels and commonalities between the two authors. But the truth is I stopped reading The Ox-Box Incident after coming across a racist description of a Black character. It shook me. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t remember it in my first reading of the book years ago. Back then, I didn’t have the awareness and sensitivity to representation that I do now. There was no intersectionality in those days. True, the book speaks to the Old West, and it does critique violent masculinity that drove the frontier spirit. But I can’t help but feel it also locks people into that violence, never lets them escape prescriptive roles, as if we’re all trapped in some cruel conception of Manifest Destiny.

Enter Dani’s first poem, “Mountain Coda,” that addresses the “Dragon-breather,” the forces of creation:

Behold your work after final breath,

scoff for the wayward-leeward life you birthed,

do it again to create a better West.

The speaker isn’t pleading with the gods of old to let them in the pantheon. This is an invocation for revolutionary change. What is the poet armed with? Queer love. Transgressive queer love for hard, repressed men, the dusty cowboys and hoary pilots that people this mountainous desert. They’re trapped too, the poet tells us. These lives are warped and arid, yet something still blooms in the sand along the rocky draws of the mountains, the miracle of human sexuality, the mystery of desire. In “To Judith Butler,” the poet says

The prickle of polyester

felt by a body in fashion

resists biological inertia

These poems resist classification along normative lines, and that resistance gives way to the liberatory impulse. In “Father’s Estate,” the poet tells a traditionalist man

If only your mom or dad or best friend

grabbed you by the cheeks, said,

Your feelings are beautiful.

This theme of queering is pushed further in the trampset-published poem “Dissonance,” which offers a traditional cowboy something other than “horses and guns and women.”

Our calloused knuckles

speak a common language:

the wilderness,

the forgotten metropolis.

Make no mistake, this sun-baked wilderness is lush. As Edward Abbey pointed out in Desert Solitaire — one of many authors cited by the poet — the spareness of the desert gives way to the richest lushness, to, as Dani writes, “lavender in the rough / against subtle tonalities / of uprooted bedrock.” The Sierra — the grand, snow-capped lush moon of our desert scene — are described as “musical” in this collection. If only humans were worthy of this landscape, worthy of the Nevada dirt. “I come alive in the dirt between my toes,” the poet writes. What if the New West could dispel our preoccupation with exploitation and death? What if people could truly live?

Dani truly lives in these poems. They have not only claimed the land as their own, but have reimagined it. A new spiritual space, alive with possibility. Sage and desire. All the grit of Nevada held in a hand that opens to scorched air. But the wind is revitalizing, a breath of snow from the high mountains. Love wells in the willows. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I want to live in this place, “where the queerest flowers grow.”