Yesenia Montilla's The Pink Box

Yesenia Montilla is a talented poet who expresses the volume of the world and her own life experiences through her intense and moving poems, found in The Pink Box. She uses sensory images to truly explain what it was like to live through the stages of her life in each section of the book.

In The Pink Box, there are three major sections, each of which most likely represents a specific time in her life. The first section, “The Wilderness,” you find many intricate poems about what it was like growing up in a very diverse world, with her family upbringing, and even the use of drugs in her home. We see a big example of this in her poem “Needles,” a harsh poem about what some she had to live with growing up. The last line of this specific poem “The way my father grunted with pleasure as the dangled against his arm like a dancer with tiny shoes

Many of the poems in this section are deep, and some may even consider them inappropriate. We see a new style of writing that we don’t get earlier on in the book, where Montilla creates and describes to us her hopes and dreams, and even her darkest fantasies. This section stresses the idea of humans seeking other humans, and implies that forever isn’t always in our thoughts. For some time, we read about love, until the last poem of the book leaves us thinking if it’s the most important thing to question. The poem “No More Love Poems” hits hard when she mentions being a victim, and living in a world where love is also supposed to mean peace. The last line is the most powerful of all, where she writes “Not one more, because in my world: we kill each other-“ The end of the book oversees everything that you have just read, and while you may have still been lingering on one of the previous love stories, she wants you to think otherwise, and maybe wonder why this poem is the last in her