From Womb to Word: The Spellwork of Briana Muñoz’s Matriarchy
Briana Muñoz’s Matriarchy (El Martillo Press) is a collection that insists on the sacredness of creation—in every sense of the word. Her poems braid the biological and the political, the ancestral and the immediate, the sacred and the profane. The voice that emerges here is both nurturing and unflinching, a voice that carries the reader through ceremonies of motherhood, protest, and survival, and does so with language that is intimate, insurgent, and deeply rooted in the soil of collective memory.
The title Matriarchy is not merely a biological marker—it is a cosmology. Muñoz’s work understands “Matriarchy” as a force that births, protects, nourishes, and resists. She writes of motherhood in the literal sense—nursing, pumping, recovering from birth under anesthesia—but also in the revolutionary sense: as the instinct that awakens when injustice is witnessed. In “By Any Means Necessary,” the maternal becomes political revelation; her body’s impulse to rise for her child mirrors the global call to free Palestine, to end mass incarceration, to abolish systems that rip mothers from their young. It’s a poem that bridges the domestic and the insurgent, reminding us that every act of protection is a political act.
In “Why I Refuse to Celebrate the Opening of the 6th Street Bridge,” Muñoz situates motherhood within the landscape of Los Angeles—a city of memory and erasure. The poem critiques gentrification’s shiny infrastructure projects, exposing how celebration often masks displacement. “They call it progress,” she writes, “but I see my tía’s apartment bulldozed / into a parking lot for the future.” Here, the poet-mother is both witness and protector, seeing through civic spectacle to the generational loss beneath it. The bridge becomes a metaphor for what is built over pain, what is paved over with amnesia.
“Sex as Ceremony” turns inward, sanctifying desire and bodily autonomy. Muñoz treats intimacy not as escape but as an extension of her spiritual and cultural inheritance. The poem’s rhythm—measured, reverent—evokes ritual: “We enter each other / the way our ancestors entered prayer.” This sacred eroticism challenges patriarchal shame and reclaims the female body as a vessel of both pleasure and holiness. It is one of the collection’s most luminous moments, balancing vulnerability with power.
The collection’s historical reach expands in “The Women of Empire Zinc,” a poem honoring the wives of striking miners in New Mexico who stepped in when their husbands were barred from picketing. Muñoz resurrects these women as foremothers of feminist resistance, linking their courage to the present-day struggles of women confronting state violence. “They brought their babies to the picket line,” she writes, “chile in one hand, justice in the other.” The image encapsulates the book’s thesis: that motherhood and militancy are not opposites, but reflections of the same instinct to protect life.
Elsewhere, in “Destroy Machismo,” Muñoz directly confronts patriarchal conditioning and its psychic toll. Rather than preaching, she offers transformation: “Take your son to therapy. / Tell your daughter she is whole.” The poem moves with the cadence of instruction, resembling both spell and manual—a kind of collective healing text for the next generation.
Stylistically, Matriarchy continues Muñoz’s evolution as a poet of testimony and transformation. The language is ritualistic, often invoking ceremony—Aztec dance, smudging, altar offerings—and yet it is also grounded in the sensory details of modern life: breast pumps, traffic on the 101, harmonicas in studio apartments. Her poetic lineage is both Chicanx and transnational, echoing Jimmy Santiago Baca, ire’ne lara silva, and Gloria Anzaldúa, while also extending into a distinctly contemporary voice that speaks from protest lines and kitchen tables alike.
This is not a quiet collection. Its content warnings—“Displacement,” “Injustice,” “Colonization in Progress”—are less disclaimers than invitations to witness. Muñoz refuses to look away, but she also refuses to despair. Her poems are full of healing: for the land, for women, for language itself. In “Destroy Machismo,” she offers not just condemnation but a blueprint for transformation.
Matriarchy is an act of spell-work, as Muñoz herself notes, calling into being a world where matriarchy means liberation. To read these poems is to be reminded that creation—whether of a child, a poem, or a movement—is the most radical gesture against erasure. In this book, Briana Muñoz gives us the revolution in its most elemental form: born, breathing, and sacred.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
