la30ena

Grateful to Urayoán Noel for this review of "plagios," my latest unpoetic effort to push language and all sort of limits out of bounds... made possible with the support of Yoandy Cabrera at the timón editorial at ediciones kýrne, and Kristin Dykstra manejando el bilingüismo a go-go higher and higher, todo en medio del descontrol de las intermitentes luces de la vida. 

plagios. By om ulloa. kýrne. This book of “plagiarisms” remixes Cuban greats such as Ernesto and Ernestina Lecuona, Beny Moré, Severo Sarduy, Lorenzo García Vega, Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima, José Martí, and Virgilio Piñera along with hemispheric and global shards of poetic modernities and modernisms (Miguel Hernández, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Shakespeare, Sor Juana, Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot, Borges, Dostoyevsky, W.C. Williams, Oliverio Girondo, etc.) into translingual post-Spanglish poems with titles like “atoMarPorcuLO” and the all-uppercase Emily Dickinson shoutout “fame iS a has-bEEn.” The Chicago-based Ulloa, who was born in Matanzas, Cuba and has lived in the US since she was a teenager, turns these strains and strands into an elusive yet dazzling linguistic performance that (as Kristin Dykstra notes in her introduction) spans everything from Afro-Cuban Abakúa and Trío Matamoros to Tristan Tzara and Dada. Don’t miss the trip-hoppings of Dante via El General’s “Tu pum pum” and The Trampps’ “Disco Inferno,” as well as the fabulous (I wish I would have done it!) “howlin’HavanaeNuevayOrk,” which hooks up Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York in a queer reverie on the soul amid the urban solitude: “a piñazo limpio y plumazo sucio banging on the floor and on each other.”

La Treintena / The Latinx Project at NYU