When to Go to the Taj Mahal, by Marcy Rae Henry

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

When to Go to the Taj Mahal offers an intimate and uncommon glimpse into a Mexican-American woman’s life in Burma and India. Poetry and prose pieces travel from the ghats and meditation centers to Delhi and the awe-inspiring Himalayas. At times a philosophically holistic approach emerges, where consciousness, altered by opium or vipassana, impacts the spirit which influences the physical, yet Henry does not wax sentimental. She is as concerned with the vibrancy of India and Buddhism as with their contradictions.  

Linguistically playful, the pieces imply an underlying seriousness:

We take off our shoes before going into homes in India to avoid dragging in dirt. Shoes are zapatos in Spanish, but Zapatas are not female shoes.  Zapata was half Spanish and half Indian, but not from India. Indio.  Mestizo. We have a hard time explaining this in India. When we try to describe his saying about preferring to die standing to living on his knees, it sounds like he didn’t want to pray.

Addressing the importance of naming, inside and outside of meditation, a narrator tells Sona, a young Himachal girl whose name means gold in Hindi:

gold is oro en español
sonar is to sound
sonarse la nariz to blow the nose
soñar to dream
and sonajero a rattle

Formally inventive, this transcultural collection includes a diagram, a contrapuntal and multiple versions of a poem about seeing the Ganges for the first time. More than trying to get it just right with the latter pieces, the author appears to ruminate over what the experience might mean in her present world, where she recalls monkeys dropping from trees in the Kangra Valley to steal vegetables while lamenting monkeys in México dying from the heat. With other striking images, including women hired to cry at a Himalayan funeral, and lovers bathing on a Delhi rooftop, Marcy Rae Henry invites readers to see poetry in the quotidian as well as the spectacular and beauty in the ephemeral.

Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey and Nepal. She is the author of the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press). Her poetry collection, death is a mariachi, won the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize and will be published spring 2025. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English, literature and creative writing at Wright College Chicago, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She is digital minimalist with no social media accounts. marcyraehenry.com