Philoctetes andaba por Dyckman: A Review of 'Embers of Exile' by Francis Mateo

Francis Mateo demystifies the romanticization of immigration through a new Dominican urban mythology.

By Roxana Calderón

In Embers of Exile: A Poetic Exodus, Dominican-born writer and actor Francis Mateo maps the emotional terrain between the Dominican Republic and New York City. Published by Get Fresh Books Publishing, the collection moves through migration, family, community, the recent pandemic, and the daily, organic performance of the Dominican diaspora in Washington Heights and Inwood. Its landscapes are both intimate and mythic: a plate of chicharrón or yautía coco can become a rite of passage during a mental journey to the island; a conversation outside a local business or a walk along Dyckman Street can carry the weight of an ancient Greek tragedy.

The collection begins with the idea of allá, not simply a location, but a place preserved in the

archives of the mind. Mateo's Dominican Republic is sensory and specific: Carnaval, merengue, fish, coffee, ocean air, constant movement. Besides that, the island is never a stable home waiting unchanged for return. It is part recollection, part invention, part longing, and that tension gives the book its emotional foundation.

Across five acts, “Allá,” “Bow and Arrow,” “Community Chronicles,” “Doomsday Prelude,” and “Sugarcane Musings,” Mateo's theatrical background claims real territory on the page. Recurring fragments labeled “Small Talk on Nagle Ave” function like pauses on a long walk, keeping the book from treating exile only as tragedy. Mateo understands that Dominican diasporic life is carried as much through the block’s laughter as through its longing.

Mateo reimagines Philoctetes–the Greek hero and master archer – through a Caribbean, Dominican, and New York lens, nowhere more strikingly than in “Tangerine Stride.” Placing an ancient hero beside coconut stands, scooters, and the ordinary motion of an uptown street, Mateo exposes both vulnerability and resilience. Near a coconut stand on Post Avenue, he is struck by a scooter, and still, Mateo writes, “his song endured.” Philoctetes stops being a literary reference and becomes a way of seeing the immigrant, the person written off as disposable who later proves indispensable.

I'll admit I couldn’t read this one at a critical distance for long. Somewhere around “Argo Navis,” I stopped taking notes and started thinking about my own immigration story, the quiet, unglamorous heroics of it, the parts nobody ever talks about. The poem’s scene is almost nothing on its surface: a handful of men sharing a drink on a Sunday morning near Dyckman Street, the ritual fist-bump followed by a quick swipe of hand sanitizer, the 1 train roaring past before the walk toward coffee. Mateo finds the Argo Navis, the mythic ship, docking right there in that ordinary block, and it put language to something I’d felt but hadn’t seen named on the page before: that displacement gets romanticized from the outside, but from inside it, it’s closer to trauma than to poetry, and that the people living it are often quietly enduring far more than anyone around them realizes.

Mateo’s writing throughout is lyrical, visual, and highly associative. English and some words in Spanish mingle naturally; Greek mythology sits beside bolero, merengue, urban geography, and everyday Dominican speech. Some poems move cinematically through brief images. Others scatter language across the page or interrupt lyric meditation with neighborhood voices, capturing the fragmentation of transnational memory.

That density can also demand something of the reader. Anyone unfamiliar with mythological,

musical, or Dominican references may occasionally feel like a boat drifting away. Yet, this

difficulty is consistent with the book's own governing metaphor, the city as both labyrinth and canvas, as Mateo notes in his preface. Embers of Exile doesn’t offer a simple route through migration, because migration itself rarely produces a simple story.

The following sections widen the lens from private longing to collective record: neighbors,

workers, musicians, overheard voices. “Doomsday Prelude” documents the pandemic through sirens, empty streets, and anxious domestic ritual rather than dramatic declaration. Catastrophe arrives through small changes in the ordinary world, which lands harder, not softer.

That same friction between the epic and the everyday shapes the book as a whole: Ulysses and the 1 train, Philoctetes and orange Crocs, the lost island and isolation in a new city. Poems like “Sugarcane” hold both the longing to return and the will to stand resolute, alongside the harder question of where home actually is once you’ve lived long enough in both places to belong fully to neither.

Embers of Exile will appeal to readers of diasporic literature, urban poetry, Dominican and

Caribbean writing, and formally adventurous work that blends cultural memory with mythology.

More than a book about leaving one country for another, it’s a meditation on what exile does to the imagination, and for readers who’ve lived some version of this story, a rare acknowledgment that the quiet, daily heroics of displacement rarely look like the myths we’re handed to explain them. Mateo suggests home may be irretrievable as a fixed place, yet it keeps surfacing anyway, in language, community, music, appetite, and the mind’s stubborn forward movement. Like the song that survives the collision in “Tangerine Stride,” something continues; wounded, transformed, and still audible.

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About the Author: Francis Mateo is a Dominican-born writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work moves across poetry, short fiction, vignettes, photography, theater, and performance. He is the author of Ubre Urbe, El Alto, TropicalYork, and Sacarle Pétalos al Pavimento. He holds a BA in English Literature and an MFA in Acting. His work explores memory, migration, language, identity, and urban life.

Roxana Calderón is a Dominican American author and editor born in Brooklyn and raised

between Santo Domingo and New York City. She is the author of La Casa de las Maletas and

Esto no es poesía, and her work has appeared in literary festivals, anthologies, and stage

productions. She holds a master’s degree in publishing from George Washington University and is the founder of Pivot Project Studio.