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:
Conference report: 'Outside-in/Inside-out,' a festival of outside and subterranean poetry
Author: Ellen Dillon
[The following conference report chronicles — “for the record” — the range of events at last year’s Outside-in/Inside-out festival of outside and subterranean poetry in Glasgow. The starting point, of course, was Barbaric Vast & Wild (Poems for the Millennium, volume 5, Black Widow Press, 2013), coedited by myself & John Bloomberg-Rissman — a small move toward what John and I were calling, unabashedly, an omnipoetics. (J.R.)]