Rachel Attias

I Miss Her Even Though I’ve Never Met Her

There are some people we love so much we try to keep them alive after they’ve died. I’m not talking about our parents, lovers, or friends. I’m talking about the ones we love from a distance, whose flaws we never see in life, so that in death they remain perfect candidates for immortality. I’m talking about celebrities like Selena Quintanilla Pérez, the Queen of Tejano music, whose tragic death in 1995 skyrocketed her from sweetheart to saint. Almost thirty years later, we keep Selena alive on T-shirts, through our blasting speakers, as a Halloween costume—her benevolent pout even graces prayer candles.

Poet and screenwriter Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s novel in verse, Dreaming of You, takes the Selena worship a step further, as the speaker of these poems literally brings Selena back to life in order to combat her own loneliness. The book is structured in four parts (each named after a different Selena song), an epilogue, an alternate ending, and intermittent sections told by a chorus of chismosas or gossips. Through all of this, Lozada-Oliva takes the reader on a dizzying, fantastical, and often hilarious journey in which the resurrection works, but to decidedly mixed results. OK, disastrous results.

The poem “Resurrecting Selena” provides a numbered list of the steps the speaker takes to bring Selena back from the dead. The process involves singing backward into a recording device, a pot of period blood buried at midnight, and a generous misting of Fabuloso cleaning spray. This magical list feels as if it is at once leaning into the current fad of witchcraft and brujería present in certain online circles, and gently making fun of it. Lozada-Oliva strikes this humorous balance all over the book, whose tone is equal parts confessional, critical, and stuff-that-made-it-out-of-the-Twitter-drafts.

I first learned of Melissa Lozada-Oliva through Twitter, probably from laughing at something she wrote before I even knew she was a poet. And indeed, much of this book reads like it was lifted straight from Lozada-Oliva’s social media: “Regretfully, the barista who gave me/ one-dollar coffees didn’t have a crush on me/ but was just ‘new’ and was recently ‘fired’/ because he ‘didn’t know’ how to ‘use the machine.’ Or, “Why are people in relationships always/ taking naps?” Or even some of the poems’ titles, like “I’m So Lonely I Grow a New Hymen” and “What If Selena Taught Me How to Fake an Orgasm.” While the very online voice of these poems did wear thin in some places, it also allowed for powerfully jarring moments when it temporarily shifted into more serious territory and then snapped right back.

The plot is gorgeously chaotic, and as a reader I had no trouble watching through my fingers as the speaker fumbles relationship after relationship: a romantic one, one with the resurrected Selena, and the one with herself. But it’s in the places where the plot diverges into the realms of beauty, love, destruction, spectacle, and Latinidad that I found myself re-reading for the author’s unflinching critiques and sharp questions. In “The Future Is Lodged Inside of the Female” Lozada-Oliva takes on the publishing industry’s appetite for a very specific kind of Latinx experience: “i’m sorry this isn’t about my mom’s accent enough/ or the way my father dilutes it/ i’m sorry this isn’t about the ten occurrences of microaggressions i can/ think of off the top of my head…” Sure, we’ve seen this critique before, but immediately the poem lists a few brief microaggressions and then admits, with an honesty I admire, that the ten microaggressions are really “maybe like, three?” Later in the same poem, with her signature humor, Lozada-Oliva writes of Selena, “honestly so sad that she’s dead but like, what if she lived long enough to/ like a tweet from a pro-life organization idk?” It’s this pith that kept me reading. Lozada-Oliva pokes at the place where spectacle ends and reality begins.

Is the Guatelombian-American (as in Guatemalan and Columbian, Lozada-Oliva’s own portmanteau) poet a beleaguered, constantly oppressed “minority,” or someone who is forced to search through her memory for a catalog of microaggressions in order to be the kind of writer the world expects? Is Selena a perfect, exalted angel, gone too soon, or just another human being, one whose religious and cultural beliefs might very well have gotten her canceled by the contemporary intersectional feminists who kneel at her altar today? The answer is both, of course, but the question, which the book asks over and over again, is the fun part.