Haupt Rodríguez Mendoza 36

Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza's JAWS

Reviewed by Benjamin Haupt

(Cardboard House Press, 2026)

Released in 1975, and widely considered to be the first cinematic blockbuster, Jaws forever married the image of the shark in cultural imagination to the notion of lurking, monstrous violence. (Peter Benchley, whose novel the film was based upon, would later express remorse that his creation had led to such hostility and consequent harm to sharks worldwide.) The film was released in Mexico as Tiburón (literally “shark,” instead of the Spanish word for “jaws,” mandíbulas).

For Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza, this seemingly innocuous swap in titles represents an opening of possibilities. “In Spanish Jaws is pronounced as if it were the plural of I, a splitting of the personality /Yos/”, she points out in her collection JAWS (originally published in 2015, and recently published by Cardboard House, co-translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier) which begins from this deliberately ambiguous interpretation. Per this observation, its title could also be understood as Yos, the “plural I” —a grammatical nonentity, technically speaking. It’s an appropriately slippery designation for the speaker who guides us through this multivalent cycle of poems, which draw identity into a tangled refraction of culture, commerce, history, ecology, entertainment, life, death, and, of course, language. (As the translators put it in their afterword, the poems in JAWS “swim in two currents at once—written in Spanish but colliding occasionally with English currents.”)

“Like every animal I have a name,” the speaker observes early in the collection, “and my name means/ represents/ Jaws is another but deep down, the same.” “Jaws” is the only name we learn for the speaker, the name for the speaker’s many selves, the Is or Yos—that is, Jaws. The opening section, “This is Water”, sketches Jaws as a character, a concept, an abstraction, a daydream or nightmare; above all, it forms a capacious I that contains multitudes, to borrow Whitman’s famous formulation. (“Jaws means that I’m up at this hour, that I should go to sleep, that blood and sharks don’t exist”; “Jaws is me and my siblings, dead embryos in my mother’s womb, embryos gobbled by me”.) Within these Is (or, Yos, or Jaws) the speaker’s evocation of the shark becomes woven into a portrait of modern ennui—they refer to themselves as “an abyssal fish of day-to-day life” —in which identity is so bound with work that one feels like a mere socioeconomic commodity, as in “Curriculum Vitae”:

I understand that this is water / and work / neat and good work / meek work for a poor shark / with a shirt made by his mother / Singer machine / a mother who smokes cigarettes / Del Prado or Carmencita / one after another / her children swimming around smoke / with brief burns / unimportant.

Along with its multiplicity of perspective, this first section sets out the images and motifs which will be the foundation for the collection’s subsequent explorations. They’re too numerous and interlinked to comprehensively lay out here—part of the pleasure of spending time with these poems comes from the endlessly generative sense that emerges as the images and language continuously circle, evolve, and deepen. The central image-vessel is the shark, of course, a complex embodiment of life and death, which remains the focal point through the collection. As the first section’s title suggests, water also forms a thematic anchor, a setting in which death and birth—the spectrum of life, in other words—become collapsed, as opening poem “Sleep Apnea” establishes: “This is water / breathe / tiny abyss within another / you fall / you fall inside yourself / […] to suffocate is to be born / I am being born / this is water.” This half-awake paralysis is almost purgatorial, and the murky web of motifs introduced here (falling, the voidlike abyss, suffocating, birthing, dying) will form a particular tension throughout the collection, a shadowy in-between space for the diffuse speaker (with all its various selves, all its Is, or Yos—here prefigured by the wavering between first- and second-person) to inhabit—or, be born into, as a shark.

To imagine being the shark is to imagine something inherently unfathomable, because human existence in the depths, the shark’s habitat, is impossible—in other words, the shark’s life itself represents the equivalent of death for us. To be Jaws--Yos—is, on some level, a synonymity with death. This paradox becomes further entangled: “Sharks always die in movies,” the speaker observes, but then adds a twist: “Life is a movie.” A few poems later, we’re reminded that “the shark continues on: not a gas tank, nor electric cables, nor garbage, nor Melville, nor Darwin, nor Spielberg have finished him off.” The shark—the ur-shark, the cultural notion-shark—is unkillable, even while it has become tantamount to the threat of death. (Thanks, in no small part, to the movie Jaws.) And yet for the shark, killing is survival. And because of that, the danger that we perceive in this biological imperative, humans in turn pursue and kill the shark under the aegis of self-protection. Yet sharks are hunted and killed for commercial purposes as well, such as to supply the demands of the culinary or fashion industry. (Not to mention, the entertainment industry—see above.) In other words, killing the shark represents our survival, or at least a telling symbol of it—part of the same socioeconomic system that extracts labour from us in order for our individual survival. It’s a thorny moral transaction, the logic of which becomes woozy the more it’s traced out (that the shark always dies in movies is symbolically significant; no actual shark dies in this case, and yet, “life is a movie,” and so does the distinction matter? Then again, “the shark continues on,” and so we will presumably continue to hunt the shark; and so on), and the speaker distils these contradictions with sly, appropriately surreally-tinged irony.

The exploration of individual entity gradually becomes more collective, more globalized, in its implications. “Something in my name turns me into a fish under attack, pursued, harpoon target, prop fish, dead fish, at 58 pesos per kilo,” she speaker says, in “A Shark in Chacala”. A few poems later, in “Shark Finning”: “I thought the Far East was far away / But a soup brings us closer / at $150 a plate / Up to 600 euros a kilo / My fins will smoke in Hong Kong / Or maybe in Mexicali / This is water”. In this deadpan horror of commerce, a twisted mirror image of our own lives emerges; we too kill and consume, and are in turn preyed upon by the demands of the systems—political, economic, cultural—that we exist within. “They didn’t take the rest, my rest, as they call it: the remains / I could reach the bottom / But there is no bottom / Only water.” This is water, our water, which we swim in.

It's fitting, then, that moving from poem to poem begins to feel like drifting, as motifs and images circle and reconnect, creating a sense of murky atmosphere. The threshold between the shark’s world and ours—the continuously contrasted states of water and air, murk and light, unconsciousness and consciousness, common language and “communicating void”—comes to constitute a fused world of dualities, where death and dreaming are interwoven with life and language. This simultaneity is refracted through the middle section, “False Friends” (a colloquialism for words that sound the same in different languages but have different meanings—e.g., of course, “jaws” and “yos”). Here, the focus on the speaker-Jaws (and Is) is scaled back, and the notional shark is expanded outward, mapped globally onto art, culture, and politics. This is reflected in a turn toward intertextuality, as poems are set alongside anecdotes and documentary material, often embellished via particular formal choices or insertions of added imagery. Among this mosaic of incorporated texts are a brief history of suicide jumpers from the Golden Gate bridge, a 1998 government memo from Tokyo about safety-related shark cull protocols, and an interview with artist Ai Hasegawa about theoretically birthing sharks and dolphins. Interspersed are black-and-white photographs sharks or fish, often in tellingly incongruous settings, such as the animatronic shark used in the filming of Jaws, propped above the water, wiry guts exposed. References to containers like aquariums, pools, and fish tanks begin to appear: Hasegawa expresses a desire to be “an aquarium/ not an incubator”; a brief note reimagines Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—the famous conceptual piece with a dead tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde-filled tank—as “the physical possibility of death in the body of someone living,” an idea that gains increasing significance as the collection progresses: through the shark in the water, the body is examined as a site of new life to grow, as a container of death, as a political property, as an individual identity, as a member of a species, as a creator of language—a mass of contradictions. Simply living, merely surviving, is a contradiction: to live is to contain death—in more ways than one, as to live is to consume. (Or, to be a consumer.) This observes a complex question around the exploitative cycle a socioeconomic system inflicts upon its workers—a violence, in a sense. Here, perhaps, is the ultimate way in which we and the shark are similar: the violence that animates our ways of surviving.

For all the emphasis on mortality and late-stage capitalist ambivalence, the tone throughout remains deft and light, in places spiky and irreverent, others faintly melancholy. There is grief, anger, and even despair within these poems, but implication carries the weight, rather than heavy-handed language. Formally, Mendoza tends to favour the prose poem, often with forward slashes breaking lines in lieu of traditional punctuation, which lends a particular mixture of propulsion and, at times, almost dissociative affect. And as Mendoza’s deceptively casual language is dense with individual, societal, cultural, and historical implications, preserving its nuances in English is no small feat; it’s especially impressive in a collection that so often emphasizes how language mediates our perceptions and assumptions about the world around us. Given this context, the very act of translating these poems functions as something like a meta-commentary on how translation can open new vantages on the hitherto familiar-seeming. (Fittingly, the translators in their thoughtful afterword describe their task as a traffic in “moments of friction,” a process of almost spiritual negotiation, resulting in “language made slightly unfaithful in order to stay alive.”)

Although her language is largely concrete, Mendoza resists tidy resolution in favour of evocative ambiguity. Still, I can’t help but think that it’s not coincidental that the penultimate poem—part of a series of untitled poems that make up the final section “Isla Contoy”—contains the collection’s most acute depiction of death, as though the speaker, and the reader along with them, has finally reached the lowest depths; after detours into commerce, culture, art, and politics, there is no longer any recourse but the transformation that has been so frequently invoked. Yet this brings a closure; the symbolic death-birth feels like an acquiescence to language’s inability to fully capture our experiences, our lives, our survival. “I can drown screaming / water comes in through my mouth / like desperation / apnea / suffocation / sleep / to suffocate is to be born,” the speaker says, echoing the collection’s opening poem. Finally, in the last poem, the speaker has returned to the environment of the individual, the mundanity of work, the hum of everyday life, the gentle melancholy of existence, the “tide of a Tuesday”; “this is water,” it concludes—a form of acceptance, or perhaps surrender, to the intractable contradictions of existence. After all: life is a movie, and sharks always die in movies. But, as we’ve been reminded, the shark continues on.

Benjamin Haupt’s fiction and poetry have appeared in places like Absynthe and Literary Heist. He has an MFA in Fiction from the University of King’s College, and he currently lives in Victoria, BC, where he mostly spends his time writing, reading, and running.