reviewed on March 18, 2026

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Cerpa’s third collection names in its title a structure that does not exist.  “The palace was never finished,” he writes in the book’s second poem.  “There was only time for labyrinth, [sic] // said the hounds.”

 

Like Calvino’s invisible cities, the palace of The Palace is an imaginary objective toward which the poet, book, and history itself endeavor to move.  It is a projection from the past—a “map,” a “secret vein,” “a shimmer of the lake as I hiked alongside it”—attempting to realize itself in the present.  When Cerpa announces that he is “confused by the labyrinth of this book,” then, he speaks to the difficulty for the contemporary poet in mediating between past and future, particularly in translating generational diasporic inheritances into a world of ecological and economic catastrophe. 

 

For Cerpa, such a mediation occurs only through paradox, and through the joyous, future-oriented ontology it allows.  “I will need a thousand springs to forget the old language,” he writes in the last poem.  “(I love the old language) // I will live a thousand springs.”  Proustian in its time dissolves, The Palace approaches art and language as a kind of spiritual time-travel, a conjuring of the past and a carrying forward.  The raising of children functions similarly, with lineage rather than line embodying a creative impulse toward immortality.  “I hold the secret vein," Cerpa writes, "my child: an emerald // in the heirloom of the earth.” 

 

Cerpa's investment in heterosexual reproduction, with all its ecological consequences, might have made for an ill ethical fit alongside his praise for the natural world as "vaguely religious."  "There doesn’t need to be a word for every unnamed bird // in flight,” he urges, privileging the alterity of nature against the colonialist procedures of language.  Yet Cerpa is keenly aware of how closely both sexual and cultural reproduction are linked to predatory economies and transhistorical systems of violence, including on the natural world.  Indeed, his invocation of what Lee Edelman calls “heteronormative futurity in thrall to reproduction” represents that form of paradox central to the argumentation of The Palace, a bid for immortality inherently compromised—unlike art, perhaps—by its own ethical limitations.  Cerpa's image of his child as an "emerald," moreover, implies an extractive relationship with the natural world, a reflexive awareness of one's potentially suspect positionality. 

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Done less successfully, this approach to ecopoetics might have skewed toward the uncritical natalism of Cecily Parks's troubling The Seeds, also from Alice James and which appears at a moment when pro-natalist sentiment is gaining alarming prominence.  It is hardly impossible to write meaningfully about one’s children, as I have argued that Rachel Richardson does in Smother, and as Philip Metres does in his most recent collection, Fugitive/Refuge, as well as in other books.  To do so in the context of ecopoetics, however, as Parks attempts, is to invite the expectation that at some point one reckons with the ethics of having children in the first place.  Parks demurs on such reckoning, treating children neither as an inevitable indulgence nor as a source of ecological ambivalence nor as presumptuous self-perpetuation, but as the primary ground of all meaning.

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The Palace is far more graceful in its ethical ambitions.  In “The Past,” one of the more narrative poems in a relatively surrealist and dissociative collection, Cerpa says that he “wanted things.  So at the start of 7th grade I rode the ferry to Manhattan / & asked for switchblades, butterfly knives, brass knuckles // at the back of each shop.”  Ominous with impending violence, the poem swerves in an unexpected direction, not toward violence per se but toward capitalist exploitation: “I chose each knife like the years as we lived them,” Cerpa writes, “[t]hen sold them the next day at school.”  At its conclusion, the poem swerves again: “When I was a child, god held a blue butterfly knife / to my jaw— // he begged me remember, he begged me / to sing.”  If Cerpa frames his young self as a budding burgher, keen for the main chance, he frames poetry in turn as an equally coerced and coercive economic practice, one paradoxically within and without lucrative capitalist economies.  “[M]y books don’t sell,” he writes in a later poem, “so I have the luxury of writing what I want.”

 

In the power of its imagination, The Palace bids for a kind of freedom loosed from history and economics alike, a freedom that proves, if not impossible, paradoxical to the degree that it remains compromised by necessity.  A smart, subtly ambitious collection, The Palace makes a virtue of that necessity.