Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Domingo instigates the question of how to mark on the page that which the poet simultaneously experiences in the cityscape. But what does it actually mean to convey a city’s “500 years of collaging over itself” in the space of a page? (125)
In the essay “Bodies-Cities,” Elizabeth Grosz argues that “[t]he city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of (sexed) corporeality: the built environment provides the context and coordinates for contemporary forms of body.”[1] There are a number of claims within this one: that corporeality is a social production, that the way corporeality is socially produced is inconsistent across bodies, and that what a body is must be bound up in what buildings are and how they use each other.
Writing puts texts in space. The procedural language of critical synthesis is inherently spatial. Thinking about connections between texts, or the bringing of texts together in an essay, simulates the positioning of objects in space. Often, writing makes texts architectural — it uses them to build, and uses the metaphorics of building. I want to use this essay to write between Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds and Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender, texts seminal to queer temporality and to feminist geography, respectively.
Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales.
Rachel Levitsky’s 2009 poetry collection, Neighbor, takes up the relationship between neighbors as it occurs between people in an apartment building who share walls and floors, but also as it affords other intimacies. Levitsky’s figure of the neighbor contains the idea of the neighbor (a person who lives near you, and whose proximity can produce a mutual, if fragmentary, knowledge of one another’s quotidian lives) alongside neighborliness at a range of competing and simultaneous scales. In one poem called “Neighbor,” Levitsky writes,
“Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects
A review of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene (Eulalia Books, 2024)
Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.
Domingo instigates the question of how to mark on the page that which the poet simultaneously experiences in the cityscape. But what does it actually mean to convey a city’s “500 years of collaging over itself” in the space of a page? (125)