Looking Back on Our Cringe-Worthy Selves: A Reading List for Teenage Weirdos

As a teenager, I desperately searched for mirrors in the media. I clung onto melancholic Belle & Sebastian songs and J.D. Salinger characters. I always felt like an outsider, writing my secrets on Tumblr, just wanting to be seen and understood.

While writing the past is a jean jacket, I wrote many poems with the intention of extending a hand to all of my complicated, closeted, cringe-worthy overdramatic teenage selves. My poems traverse my millennial loner teenage experiences like seeking validation on my blog and escaping through movies and music every night.

Here are a few collections that touch on the complications of teenagedom.

*

Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard, Michele Serros

Michele Serros captures the experiences of a Chicana teenhood with such an aching familiarity. Her poetry is nuanced, showing readers the multifacetedness of a Mexican-American family. In my favorite poem of the collection, “Annie Says,” Serros lists all of her tía’s discouraging comments about Serros wanting to be a writer. In that same poem, Serros ends with her tía asking her to change the channel to As The World Turns. Chicanas, especially those that do anything outside the norm, are often challenged by their family, yet we still deeply care for them.

It’s that sort of complex perspective on Mexican-American families that makes me love this book.

Serros writes with such an immediate intimacy, ranging from Catholic guilt in Planned Parenthood to feeling like an outsider amongst her Chicano classmates. She says,

My skin is brown
just like theirs,
but now I’m unworthy of the color
cause I don’t speak Spanish
the way I should.

As a self-identified pocha, these are the poems I wish I had read as a teenager.

the matchstick litanies, jo reyes-boitel

The dedication in jo reyes-boitel’s the matchstick litanies reads, “I wrote this book for the twelve-year-old girl I was.” There is a palpable tenderness in reyes-boitel’s poems, that she extended to her younger self. The matchstick litanies doesn’t shy away from the ugly, painful memories of adolescence, but also revels in the soft details of her past. She not only extends empathy to her 12 year old self, but also images what her mother went through as an adolescent in her poem, “starless.” reyes-boitel lists out her teenage experiences including: immigration from Cuba to Florida, her mom’s passing from an aneurysm, and finishing her GED all between the ages of 16 to 18. It is through reyes-boitel’s empathetic lens on her past that we as readers witness the generational healing occur.

Amapolasong, Jacinto Jesús Cardona

As a daughter of a self-described “bookish bato,” I had to include my father’s coming-of-age poetry collection Amapolasong to my list. It wasn’t until I edited his poetry collection for Plancha Press in 2022, that I had a deeper understanding of what he went through as a teenager in South Texas. I find comfort in knowing that we both grew up feeling like outsiders. Like both Chicana Falsa and the matchstick litanies, Cardona’s poems focus both on his adolescence and his family. These poems muse on being a quiet studious Chicano growing up in 1950s Alice, TX. What I admire most about his work is that even when moments get dark and heavy, there is always a sense of lightness through his use of rhyme and playful Spanglish slang. For example, in his poem “Bato Con Khakis” Cardona writes:

alas I’m the bifocals kid
cool bato I am not
but I could spell gelato
could I be the bookish bato

This combination of heaviness and play speaks to what I see is a common coping mechanism in Chicano households. We frequently use humor and play as survival mechanisms. His balancing act of both light and dark is something I aspire towards in my writing.

Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson really was the blueprint. I admire Dickinson for many reasons, but especially for her ability to capture a range of human experiences. Her poetry carries it all—the metaphysical, the flirtatious, the unsettling, the provocative— all in such miniscule space. I can only imagine that if she was alive in the 2010s, she’d go platinum on Tumblr with her text posts.

“I’m Nobody! Who are You?” is one of my favorite poems of hers because of the way Dickinson captures that feeling of a loner finding camaraderie with another loner. It is very Enid and Rebecca from Ghost World coded. I mean how many antisocial pairs of besties have thought, “How dreary – to be – Somebody!” I definitely did while hanging out with two friends at an empty tennis court on the night of our semi-formal dance.

__________________________________

the past is a jean jacket by Cloud Delfina Cardona is available from Hub City Press.