The Protean Beauty of Gustavo Hernandez’s Bachelor
by Alexandra Umlas
Hiking with my very young daughters through the winding canyons of Utah’s Zion National Park, I felt the same mixture of fear, wonder, and discovery that Gustavo Hernandez evokes in his latest collection of poems, Bachelor (FlowerSong Press). We rose early to explore the area called The Narrows. The hike there is mostly in the river, with towering canyon walls lush with dripping water and moss. My smallest was scared, so I carried her, unable to see around the next bend ahead, unsure what the canyon would reveal. Though my arms ached with the carrying, I wanted to see more, and then more. Gustavo Hernandez’s poems offer a similar experience: they are full of the textures of everyday life, layered with the miraculous, guiding and impelling the reader forward with curiosity and wonder.
Born in Jalisco, Mexico, and raised in Santa Ana, California, Gustavo Hernandez works in the spaces where one world gives way to another. His first book of poetry, Flower Grand First, dwells in these liminal spaces, tracing the poetry of place. His latest collection returns to liminality but turns inward—away from geography and toward the self—exploring the many roles he inhabits and the quiet, continuous act of moving between them. Like Proteus of Greek mythology, each poem reveals a poet in motion: shapeshifting and never fully graspable. Hernandez wears many hats. As the 2024–2026 Poet Laureate of Orange County, he affirms poetry’s enduring power to open doors and invite connections. Beyond the page, he is also a court clerk, an uncle, a brother, and a poetry workshop instructor at Irvine Valley College, etc., but one role that takes precedence in the book is the role of being a bachelor.
This newest collection opens with “Baritone,” a 13-line, lyric poem. Like many in the book, it is compact and precise, yet expansive in its scope. The word, “baritone,” Greek in origin, suggests a deep, resonant sound, and the poem demands that we slow down and listen carefully. In it, it is as if the speaker can rise out of themselves to become an observer of his own life:
You think and mouth and wait to be acted upon.
And in the waiting, I often stand right here and wonder
about my voice. What it is now. The cloudy painting.
These children. My mother. Me in the third person. Him. (5)
Hernandez’s attention to sound and musicality evokes Beethoven’s notion that “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” Like music, poetry navigates the liminal space between the tangible and the ineffable. In Bachelor, Hernandez uses sound not only to enchant but also to guide the reader, making musicality a kind of negotiator between perception and meaning. Meanwhile, the speaker of these poems moves fluidly between observer and participant. Through careful attention to detail, language, and form, the poet inhabits multiple perspectives simultaneously— self and other, past and present, actor and witness. In Hernandez’s Bachelor, this reflective stance mirrors the Protean fluidity of identity: the poems invite readers to observe the shifting roles we all inhabit, revealing life as a series of overlapping selves.
“Morning Song,” navigates the idea that just as we are several people, we can be in several spaces at the same time. The speaker of the poem brings us along for a family memory that manages to inhabit the present and the past. It ends
...Rustle of my leather vest that is not a cowboy vest.
Gunsmoke on tv and the dry fields and voices of the actors
who are all long gone. My father had a strong, joyful voice
and a funny way of saying golly! With a long pause
between the syllables. This is my dad saying gol-
ly! and the hooves of my nephew’s plastic horse on the living. (69)
Hernandez negotiates the interplay of love, memory, and familial relations without resorting to sentimentality, allowing each concrete detail to illuminate the complex ways in which identity is performed. The speaker’s observation that the leather vest is not a cowboy vest establishes a distinction between himself and the actors on the screen, who enact roles. This moment highlights the negotiation we all deal with when we assume multiple roles—observer, son, uncle, listener, wearer of vests, and custodian of a father’s idiosyncratic voice.
Repetition is a central feature of Bachelor. Poems share titles—there are two poems titled “Husband,” eight titled “Bachelor,” five titled “Nocturne,” etc.— creating echoes, variations, and refracted perspectives. Each poem reexamines its subject, sometimes comforting, sometimes disorienting, inviting the reader to linger in the liminal spaces between fear and beauty, absence and presence, and the obscure and the precise.
In the first of four poems titled “I Can’t Settle on One Figure for A Sunset,” Hernandez writes,
I want a sunset to be all of that.
I want to reject reduction. Like a surfer is allowed
to hold beauty and fear in the same hand... (12)
And that is exactly what these poems do. Hernandez allows paradox to thrive on the page, embracing contradiction while also illuminating what matters most. There is a flickering that keeps us in the between. Hernandez takes full advantage of the lovely contradictions inherent in the world and uses them to expand meaning.
The repetition means that rather than a title poem, we have title poems. We have “Bachelors” that culminate in the final poem, the final “Bachelor” which delves into the difficulty we all face in describing what matters. The center of the poem is a set of prayer-like commands for a lover (but really for us all):
Say family. Say four walls. Say the hum of bees.
Say it is a long trip on horseback. A justification.
Say son. Say husband. Say archbishop. Say night. (78)
Here, Hernandez celebrates the act of articulating in spoken language what is fleeting and complex. Earlier, in “Son,” Hernandez demonstrates his gift for noticing the world in all its varied instructions. Lessons emerge from surprising places: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Luis Aguilar, a sermon, and even a Walmart clock, “the one with the painted roses and the scrollwork / that reads All things are possible if you believe” (75).
The world is an eclectic teacher, and in this book, we see many things in it functioning as unexpected oracles. Although this can be terrifying; Hernandez doesn’t turn away. In “Poem” he writes,
What did I love?
Being able to touch
all four walls. Pressing on the words
hair and hunk and grain until they gave
me what I wanted. (47)
The passage conveys a tension between control and uncertainty, between the speaker’s agency and the fluidity of the world, its time, and its spaces. Words, when engaged with thoughtfully, become a means of living more fully, of being more alive. In this way, Hernandez shares his craft—its pleasures, its invitations—culminating in the speaker’s intimate revelation:
I have taught all my lovers how to write.
The lamp that sits in the corner of my room is dim.
I have taught all of them how to describe it. (78)
I mean it as a compliment when I say that reading Bachelor often felt like playing with one of those slippery water-snake toys from childhood, the kind that you desperately tried to hold on to, but that always slid through your hands. And yet, the experience delights and surprises, revealing the world in ways you never expected. At times, Hernandez jolted me into recognition. In my favorite poem in the collection, originally published by the Academy of American Poets, he writes:
Summer, You’re A Boneyard
and you used to be The Richard Bey Show
and my sister’s spaghetti. Under a friar plum tree,
a simplified reading of “The Argonautica.”
You kept me full and entertained. I was that kind
of round child. Gorging on what was left over.
I didn’t want a real burden, my own ship or story.
I didn’t want to go on ahead. I didn’t want to
have to reverse into you. Into your apparatus.
I never wanted nostalgia. We used to know each other,
remember? Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid.
Not. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry.
Why did we have to pry open our patch of dirt?
Why couldn’t you always be acid wash
or those I CAN’T DRIVE 55 posters at the swap meet
or sunglasses. I never wanted to lay questions around
you. What if he takes another this year? What if
he’s difficult to talk my way out of? What if he eats me
only half-alive? What if all he is in his beach bum
orange is ghosts clothespinned to the laundry line? (20)
Even without firsthand experience of these things (I have never seen The Richard Bey Show nor tasted this sister’s spaghetti, the intimate, idiosyncratic textures of life that Hernandez conveys so beautifully and surprisingly deeply resonated with me.
Hernandez’s Bachelor demonstrates how poetry can transform the world, remaking it into a more intricate, and deeply human place. The collection rewards careful reading, reflection, and sustained attention, offering insights, moments of wonder, and emotional truths that linger long after each poem is over. Bachelor is a work well worth engaging in, though its meanings are not easily contained—they will haunt you, and cause you to reflect on your own roles. I found myself captivated by the collection--for all its slipperiness, Bachelor is a beautiful book of poems.
Born in Jalisco, Mexico, and raised in Santa Ana, California, Gustavo Hernandez works in the spaces where one world gives way to another. His first book of poetry, Flower Grand First, dwells in these liminal spaces, tracing the poetry of place. His latest collection returns to liminality but turns inward—away from geography and toward the self—exploring the many roles he inhabits and the quiet, continuous act of moving between them. Like Proteus of Greek mythology, each poem reveals a poet in motion: shapeshifting and never fully graspable. Hernandez wears many hats. As the 2024–2026 Poet Laureate of Orange County, he affirms poetry’s enduring power to open doors and invite connections. Beyond the page, he is also a court clerk, an uncle, a brother, and a poetry workshop instructor at Irvine Valley College, etc., but one role that takes precedence in the book is the role of being a bachelor.
This newest collection opens with “Baritone,” a 13-line, lyric poem. Like many in the book, it is compact and precise, yet expansive in its scope. The word, “baritone,” Greek in origin, suggests a deep, resonant sound, and the poem demands that we slow down and listen carefully. In it, it is as if the speaker can rise out of themselves to become an observer of his own life:
You think and mouth and wait to be acted upon.
And in the waiting, I often stand right here and wonder
about my voice. What it is now. The cloudy painting.
These children. My mother. Me in the third person. Him. (5)
Hernandez’s attention to sound and musicality evokes Beethoven’s notion that “Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” Like music, poetry navigates the liminal space between the tangible and the ineffable. In Bachelor, Hernandez uses sound not only to enchant but also to guide the reader, making musicality a kind of negotiator between perception and meaning. Meanwhile, the speaker of these poems moves fluidly between observer and participant. Through careful attention to detail, language, and form, the poet inhabits multiple perspectives simultaneously— self and other, past and present, actor and witness. In Hernandez’s Bachelor, this reflective stance mirrors the Protean fluidity of identity: the poems invite readers to observe the shifting roles we all inhabit, revealing life as a series of overlapping selves.
“Morning Song,” navigates the idea that just as we are several people, we can be in several spaces at the same time. The speaker of the poem brings us along for a family memory that manages to inhabit the present and the past. It ends
...Rustle of my leather vest that is not a cowboy vest.
Gunsmoke on tv and the dry fields and voices of the actors
who are all long gone. My father had a strong, joyful voice
and a funny way of saying golly! With a long pause
between the syllables. This is my dad saying gol-
ly! and the hooves of my nephew’s plastic horse on the living. (69)
Hernandez negotiates the interplay of love, memory, and familial relations without resorting to sentimentality, allowing each concrete detail to illuminate the complex ways in which identity is performed. The speaker’s observation that the leather vest is not a cowboy vest establishes a distinction between himself and the actors on the screen, who enact roles. This moment highlights the negotiation we all deal with when we assume multiple roles—observer, son, uncle, listener, wearer of vests, and custodian of a father’s idiosyncratic voice.
Repetition is a central feature of Bachelor. Poems share titles—there are two poems titled “Husband,” eight titled “Bachelor,” five titled “Nocturne,” etc.— creating echoes, variations, and refracted perspectives. Each poem reexamines its subject, sometimes comforting, sometimes disorienting, inviting the reader to linger in the liminal spaces between fear and beauty, absence and presence, and the obscure and the precise.
In the first of four poems titled “I Can’t Settle on One Figure for A Sunset,” Hernandez writes,
I want a sunset to be all of that.
I want to reject reduction. Like a surfer is allowed
to hold beauty and fear in the same hand... (12)
And that is exactly what these poems do. Hernandez allows paradox to thrive on the page, embracing contradiction while also illuminating what matters most. There is a flickering that keeps us in the between. Hernandez takes full advantage of the lovely contradictions inherent in the world and uses them to expand meaning.
The repetition means that rather than a title poem, we have title poems. We have “Bachelors” that culminate in the final poem, the final “Bachelor” which delves into the difficulty we all face in describing what matters. The center of the poem is a set of prayer-like commands for a lover (but really for us all):
Say family. Say four walls. Say the hum of bees.
Say it is a long trip on horseback. A justification.
Say son. Say husband. Say archbishop. Say night. (78)
Here, Hernandez celebrates the act of articulating in spoken language what is fleeting and complex. Earlier, in “Son,” Hernandez demonstrates his gift for noticing the world in all its varied instructions. Lessons emerge from surprising places: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Luis Aguilar, a sermon, and even a Walmart clock, “the one with the painted roses and the scrollwork / that reads All things are possible if you believe” (75).
The world is an eclectic teacher, and in this book, we see many things in it functioning as unexpected oracles. Although this can be terrifying; Hernandez doesn’t turn away. In “Poem” he writes,
What did I love?
Being able to touch
all four walls. Pressing on the words
hair and hunk and grain until they gave
me what I wanted. (47)
The passage conveys a tension between control and uncertainty, between the speaker’s agency and the fluidity of the world, its time, and its spaces. Words, when engaged with thoughtfully, become a means of living more fully, of being more alive. In this way, Hernandez shares his craft—its pleasures, its invitations—culminating in the speaker’s intimate revelation:
I have taught all my lovers how to write.
The lamp that sits in the corner of my room is dim.
I have taught all of them how to describe it. (78)
I mean it as a compliment when I say that reading Bachelor often felt like playing with one of those slippery water-snake toys from childhood, the kind that you desperately tried to hold on to, but that always slid through your hands. And yet, the experience delights and surprises, revealing the world in ways you never expected. At times, Hernandez jolted me into recognition. In my favorite poem in the collection, originally published by the Academy of American Poets, he writes:
Summer, You’re A Boneyard
and you used to be The Richard Bey Show
and my sister’s spaghetti. Under a friar plum tree,
a simplified reading of “The Argonautica.”
You kept me full and entertained. I was that kind
of round child. Gorging on what was left over.
I didn’t want a real burden, my own ship or story.
I didn’t want to go on ahead. I didn’t want to
have to reverse into you. Into your apparatus.
I never wanted nostalgia. We used to know each other,
remember? Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid.
Not. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry. Humid. Dry.
Why did we have to pry open our patch of dirt?
Why couldn’t you always be acid wash
or those I CAN’T DRIVE 55 posters at the swap meet
or sunglasses. I never wanted to lay questions around
you. What if he takes another this year? What if
he’s difficult to talk my way out of? What if he eats me
only half-alive? What if all he is in his beach bum
orange is ghosts clothespinned to the laundry line? (20)
Even without firsthand experience of these things (I have never seen The Richard Bey Show nor tasted this sister’s spaghetti, the intimate, idiosyncratic textures of life that Hernandez conveys so beautifully and surprisingly deeply resonated with me.
Hernandez’s Bachelor demonstrates how poetry can transform the world, remaking it into a more intricate, and deeply human place. The collection rewards careful reading, reflection, and sustained attention, offering insights, moments of wonder, and emotional truths that linger long after each poem is over. Bachelor is a work well worth engaging in, though its meanings are not easily contained—they will haunt you, and cause you to reflect on your own roles. I found myself captivated by the collection--for all its slipperiness, Bachelor is a beautiful book of poems.
Alexandra Umlas lives in Huntington Beach, CA with her husband and two daughters, who inspire much of her writing. She loves teaching, reading, and taking road trips. Alexandra's first collection of poetry At the Table of the Unknown, was published by Moon Tide Press. A graduate of the M.F.A. Poetry program at California State University, Long Beach with an emphasis in Cross-Cultural teaching. she currently teaches college writing and high school humanities.
