A review of 'lo terciario/the tertiary'
The Spanish and English texts are rotated 180° relative to one another, such that the bilingual reader, halfway in, would rotate the book upside down to read the collection in its entirety. Or — if you are an anglophone reader, like myself — you are made literally aware that you are reading only one half of the book.
los productos del trabajo tienen sus residuos.
a estos residuos les llamamos objetividad espectral.
a esta objetividad espectral le llamamos mera gelatina.
a esta mera gelatina le llamamos
cristalizaciones de la sustancia social común.
a estas cristalizaciones les llamamos valor.[1]
So begins “todas sus propiedades sensibles se han esfumado,” the opening poem of lo terciario/the tertiary, the newest collection released in May by Puerto Rican poet and translator Raquel Salas Rivera. Or it begins:
Music for the ecoelegaic
Cecily Nicholson's 'Wayside Sang'
Cecily Nicholson’s poetry expresses a deep solidarity extended across time and space, and across divisions between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. As I try to prise apart what the term “biotariat” might be made to mean, I find poetry instructive because of its willingness to attend to just such “crossings” and movements amongst and between language’s subjects and objects — to, literally, lay them out on the paratactic page. For a diasporic poet like Nicholson this has something to do with “blackness” — I have in mind Fred Moten’s comment (from In the Break) that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” Everywhere in her poetry Nicholson is concerned with the resistance of “objects” — of those who have been rendered (reduced to) “objects” through regimes of racialized violence and colonization, and the fluid affinities the variously objectified find and found.
Cecily Nicholson’s poetry expresses a deep solidarity extended across time and space, and across divisions between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. As I try to prise apart what the term “biotariat” might be made to mean, I find poetry instructive because of its willingness to attend to just such “crossings” and movements amongst and between language’s subjects and objects — to, literally, lay them out on the paratactic page.