You Da One

Author: Jenni(f)fer Tamayo

Publisher: Noemi Press (2017)

"'I am addressable'—Jennifer Tamayo’s You Da One is a maliciously filial exploration of packaged familial relations. Professional Detail: suggest face-to-face interplay with the severed head of Gwyneth Paltrow in Se7en. Is that your daughter? Is she a box? Tamayo posits a slick surface of home and determinate location only to scrape it through a landfill of epistolary detritus, Spanglish, and pop music. Daddy-daughter playtime becomes a sweet serial narrative, caught and unraveling on the jagged edge of obedience. There is no manicured heaven here, nor any logic of quotation, simply the primordial spit of techno-banality from which emerges the thrill of the partial. Look into those $50 bona fide baby blues: you (the one) you’re on a lawn, your hand is in a bowl of grapes. Look at the camera, darling, smile for Mommy in your best interior composition!"

—Trisha Low