WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., Rodrigo Toscano
Omnidawn, 2025
The latest from New Orleans-based poet Rodrigo Toscano is WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., a curious collection for how he writes so expansively around and through subject, offering precise and careful measures around culture, American history, providing a perspective that Walt Whitman couldn’t conceive of. Set in a quartet of sections—“MAIORIS HISPANIAE,” “IMPERIUM,” “HUMANITAS” and “ARTIFICIA NATIONALIS”—Toscano counterpoints the narrative of imperial glory so prevalent through the United States, focusing especially on its treatment of the Spanish-speaking populations the settlers found living across that southern stretch. He writes of empire, as the poem “Hominae Romanum” begins: “The popular meme is that / men think of the Roman Empire / at least once a day. // Senatus Populusque Romanum / stupendous aqueducts galore / badass sewers to spare. // ‘Yeah man, better to um / swear allegiance now / than drag this on.’”
WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. is Toscano’s twelfth full-length collection, following on the heels of titles such as the Covid-era The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2021) and more recent The Cut Point (Counterpath, 2023), a title I seem to have missed. I’m curious at how he seems to build his books as self-contained projects, allowing threads of ongoing concern slip in and out, but holding each title as a coherent, separate unit; setting, in this new collection, the three cornerstones of his collection full in the title. “Something here,” he writes, to open the poem “Humanity (a meandering raft),” “won’t allow / a simple phrase about Humanity. // Since Humanity is a dream / dreaming us, it floats, fragments. // So maybe this is a fragment / adrift in perilous waters // let’s say, a swamp / at midday, in summer.” Individually, the poems in this collection offer moments, each a kind of stillness or focused action, that accumulates, almost as a photo album, displaying a far larger, and indirect, book-length narrative; sharp for what the book displays, one line, one lyric, at a time. “Baton Rouge,” he writes, as part of the poem “Poets of Shenzhen,” “our state capital / can’t be accessed by high-speed rail // Talk of rails—is 30 years old! / Homeless tents populate our streets // Still, though, poets from Baton Rouge / happily find their way to us. // Which of your poets reads tonight? / What’s the latest styles? What’s the vibe?”
There is a way that Toscano manages such broad reach, such a wide canvas, across a lyric composed of such focused, individual points, and overall, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. is very much a book about empire, its effects and its counternarratives; of what becomes of those who encounter it, riffing language across a staccato of contemporary and historical references, old gods and gunfire, and whatever peace might be brought through occupation and subjugation. His is a lyric of clipped divinity, unfolding sharp lines and couplets layered upon another, attempting to document and even counterpoint such historic and ongoing violence through a wildly playful gestural patter. “Taylor Swift and uh, the un/ Durability, um, of, uh, those / two words, might (might),” he writes, to open “Pax Americana,” a sequence of fifteen three-line bursts that demands itself be heard, and offers, further on: “Demographics—plural (plural), like uh / The Lefts, The Rights, plural, um / Diplomat Majorette, ok, yeah [.]”
rob mclennan is the author of nearly fifty published books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025). His above/ground press, which now has a clever substack, will be thirty-three years old in 2026.
