The Things We Swear We’ll Never Repeat: Inheritance and Becoming in Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s Burn Me Back
What happens when a mother looks at her daughter and realizes she is repeating the very thing she once promised herself she would never do? What if the behaviors we inherit from our mothers are not always ones we would be proud to show off?
I spent hours trying to build an outline that would perfectly capture the progression of themes in this book. In the end, I scrapped the outline and decided to write from the heart. Burn Me Back by Peggy Robles-Alvarado made me think differently about poetry. It also made me think differently about the relationship between parents and children.
Published in 2025, Burn Me Back is a poetry collection that explores family, grief, womanhood, identity, addiction, memory, and experiences passed down through generations. It is divided into three sections, “Light,” “Slow Burn,” and “Glow,” each containing poems that look at different parts of the speaker’s life and family history. Together, the sections read as a progression. “Light” gathers poems about what we are taught and what we inherit from the people around us. “Slow Burn” is where those inheritances begin to surface and have to be addressed. “Glow” reads like a becoming: finding your own voice and figuring out what you want to carry forward and what you want to leave behind. The vulnerability throughout the collection makes you pause, sit with the poems, analyze them, and reflect on your own relationships, especially if you are the child of migrant or immigrant parents. As I read, I kept returning to one question: If you recognize behaviors in your parents that you dislike, can you still inherit them?
I fell in love the moment I saw the cover. Can you blame me? It is a work of art in its own right. The cover was designed by Bryam Jiménez López in collaboration with the author. Robles-Alvarado explained that the two worked closely together, wanting the cover to represent elements of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Washington Heights. Knowing that it grew out of a collaboration between poet and artist made me appreciate it even more.
“If you recognize behaviors in your parents that you dislike, can you still inherit them?”
To me, the woman on the cover, with her red lipstick, represents coming of age. The image is bold and feminine. It made me think of the poem “Haikus For Tia The First Time She Returned To Santiago From Nueva Yol,” which describes an aunt returning to Santiago with her hair done, nice clothes, jewelry, and a freshly set red manicure. Red appears again here, a color often associated with bold women. All these fancy things signal success, but the poem also reveals that she got some of them from cheap stores, by working overnight, and on layaway. This brings me to the mask the woman on the cover is wearing. Like the tía in the poem, she masks her hardship and fakes success.
Another thing that drew me to this book was its exceptional use of form. It immerses you in the experience in a way that poetry following traditional form never could. One poem, “When Asked Why I Don’t Drink,” from the “Glow” section, begins as a multiple-choice question and then spirals into a whirlpool. This whirlpool reminded me of the circles of water at the bottom of the book’s cover. Throughout the collection, Robles-Alvarado does magnificent things with form, from setting poems in landscape rather than portrait orientation to visually mimicking a text-message exchange on the page.
I also loved that Robles-Alvarado never pretends to be someone she is not. She speaks English, Spanish, Spanglish, grief, awareness, becoming, and growth, the last of which are the focus of her final section, “Glow.” Somehow, all of this is woven seamlessly into the book. No part of her is left unrepresented. In “When You’re the Only One in the House Who Speaks English,” a daughter becomes the translator for her family. She describes her “third grade English trembling / at the sight of legal paper and torn / envelope.” Though her English is still developing, she already carries a responsibility beyond her years. She is not simply learning a language; she is becoming responsible for helping her family understand the world around them. This made me realize that inheritance is not always about behavior. Sometimes we inherit responsibilities, fears, expectations, and roles within our families.
“Inheritance is not always about behavior. Sometimes we inherit responsibilities, fears, expectations, and roles within our families.”
People often say stories are windows into other worlds. In this book, each poem was a window into Robles-Alvarado’s world, where I could also see my own life and the lives of many women in my family. This happened when I read “Learning to Cook” from the “Light” section. I was transported to a kitchen full of mothers, wives, daughters, and aunties. The kitchen becomes a space where the women share their secrets, recipes, and pain. Robles-Alvarado calls it “their safe house, keeper of secrets,” a phrase that stood out to me because the kitchen is more than a place where food is made.
It is a place where women can be themselves with other women. But there is also something painful about what they learn there. The poem describes how the tías “...fed their men / and learned to starve themselves...” To me, this is where daughters begin to inherit things that are not always spoken aloud. They learn what it means to be a woman by watching the women around them: how to care for others, how to sacrifice, and sometimes how to put themselves last. The kitchen protects them, but it also teaches them expectations about womanhood that they may carry long after they leave it.
“The kitchen protects them, but it also teaches them expectations about womanhood that they may carry long after they leave it.”
“Sonnet In Case Tio Chucho Brings Brugal To the Party” also made me think about what happens when protecting the family’s image becomes more important than protecting the people in the family. A young girl is warned by her aunties to stay away from her uncle because of what he has done to other girls. She is told not to sit on his lap because she is his favorite. Here, the responsibility for staying safe is placed on the child instead of the adults. The family knew enough to warn her, yet he was still allowed to remain part of family life. It made me wonder what happens when the people who are supposed to protect you fail to do so because they care more about keeping the family together or protecting its image. Family can be a place of protection, but it can also become a place where harmful things are hidden to preserve that image.
The idea of inheritance becomes even clearer in “Why I Have So Many Unopened Bottles of Palo Viejo.” The speaker reflects on her father, her grief, and her own relationship with drinking. What stayed with me was the idea that knowing what hurt someone does not mean you will never do the same thing. This brought me back to my original question: If you recognize behaviors in your parents that you dislike, can you still inherit them? I think Burn Me Back shows that sometimes we inherit things without even realizing it. We can inherit how our mothers teach us to be women, the responsibilities our families give us, the things they do not talk about, and even behaviors we promised ourselves we would never repeat.
“Family can be a place of protection, but it can also become a place where harmful things are hidden to preserve that image.”
By the end of Burn Me Back, I found myself thinking about my own family and what we inherit from the people who raise us. The book made me ask what I will carry with me and what I will choose to leave behind. I just hope I address the inheritances I am not proud of sooner rather than later.
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