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:
The lives of the experimental poets 10-12
Stewart, Farrell, Breeze
10. Amanda Stewart
unsaidfieldsresonancesnotationsdistinctionsgapsabsencesdisjunctionsbetween
(“vice versa” I/T, p. 23)
In the voiceover to the 1991 film Eclipse of the Man-Made Sun, a film about the “language of the user” of atomic bombs and nuclear energy in times of proliferation, directed by Amanda Stewart and Nicolette Freeman, Stewart exposes the language of nuclear weapons. This is a film attentive to cinematic language and its particular modes of invention. Letters crop up red across the screen with the acronyms (Permissive Action Link [PAL]). So the language tells us, they’re your “pal”: the weapons are humanized, the victims, dehumanized. Later on, the documentary enters into increasing levels of abstraction — some might see a resemblance to the “Star Gate” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey — but it’s that abstraction that becomes the critique. The saturated color breaks away from the cinematic citation of advertisements and clips from mid-century Australian propagandizing around atomic energy and the use of uranium.*