Contemporary Authors

• Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2002
• Talk Shows Switchback Books (Chicago, IL), 2006
• Feliz Año Nuevo ( title means "Happy New Year"; edited and translated by Cristián Gómez Olivares) Luces de Gálibo (Girona, Spain), 2017

1. Talk shows https://lccn.loc.gov/2006905845 Torre, Mónica de la. Talk shows / Mónica de la Torre. Chicago : Switchback Books, c2006. 66 p. ; 23 cm. PS3620.O589 T35 2006 ISBN: 9780978617202 (paperback)0978617207 (paperback) 2. Feliz año nuevo https://lccn.loc.gov/2017422568 Torre, Mónica de la. Feliz año nuevo / Mónica de la Torre ; edición y traducción de Cristián Gómez Olivares. Girona : Luces de Gálibo, [2017] 212 pages ; 23 cm. PS3620.O589 F44 2017 ISBN: 9788415117438

• The Happy End / All Welcome - 2017 Ugly Duckling Presse, https://smile.amazon.com/Happy-End-All-Welcome/dp/1937027732/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508561571&sr=8-1&keywords=M%C3%B3nica+de+la+Torre
• Public Domain - 2008 Roof Books, https://smile.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Monica-Torre/dp/1931824304/ref=sr_1_2_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508561571&sr=8-2&keywords=M%C3%B3nica+de+la+Torre
• Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry: 1 - 2013 Copper Canyon Press, https://smile.amazon.com/Reversible-Monuments-Contemporary-Mexican-Spanish-ebook/dp/B00CGNQVI4/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1508562008&sr=1-3

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/monica-de-la-torre

  Mónica de la Torre

  Bruce Pearson

  Poet, translator, and scholar Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City. She earned a BA from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and, with the support of a Fulbright scholarship, relocated to New York in 1993 to pursue an MFA and a PhD in Spanish literature at Columbia University.

  With dark humor, de la Torre’s poems explore our constructions of identity and trajectory. Her full-length poetry collections include Public Domain (2008), Talk Shows (2007). She has also published the chapbooks Four (Switchback) and The Happy End (Song Cave). With artist Terence Gower, she co-authored the art book Appendices, Illustrations and Notes (1999). She frequently collaborates with artists and writers, as with Collective Task. Taller de Taquimecanografía, published in Mexico City, is the result of another collaboration. She contributed to Predictions (2009), a study of indeterminacy, and to the conceptual critical work Laureana Toledo: The Limit (2008).

  De la Torre coedited, with Michael Wiegers, the bilingual anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002). Her translations from Spanish include Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids (2007, co-translated with Rosa Alcalá) and Poems by Gerardo Deniz (2000), which she also edited.

  De la Torre’s honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has edited BOMB Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Brooklyn.

  In July 2014, she was a featured writer for Harriet.
  Poems by Mónica de la Torre

  How to Look at Mexican Highways
  Migrating Birds
  Poem in Spanish
  See All Poems by Mónica de la Torre

• Brown University Web site. - https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/m%C3%B3nica-de-la-torre

  Mónica de la Torre
  Bonderman Assitant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts
  Office Location: Room 210 - 68.5 Brown St.
  Phone: (401) 863-3271
  monica_de_la_torre@brown.edu

  Fall 2017 Courses
  LITR
  LITR

  Spring 2018 courses

  LITR
  LITR 1010B, Sec. 1 – Advanced Poetry

  Mónica de la Torre’s poetry book The Happy End/All Welcome is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse this fall. Previous books include Public Domain (Roof Books, 2008) and Talk Shows (Switchback, 2007), as well as two collections in Spanish published in Mexico City, where she was born and raised. She has translated an array of Latin American poets including the late Gerardo Deniz, and coedited the anthology Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry(Copper Canyon Press). She has participated in several multidisciplinary collectives, among them Taller de Taquimecanografía, whose self-titled volume was published in 2011 by Tumbona Ediciones. Most recently her work appeared in the volume The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience (2015), published in conjunction with the New Museum’s Triennial. She was senior editor at BOMB Magazine from 2007–2016.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/monica-de-la-torre-on-corporatese-and-the-oppression-of-fancy-chairs/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I don’t deliberately set out to try different approaches ‘for the sake of variety,’ though, from the get-go, I push myself to be open to explore where any given project might lead me,” she told Peter Mishler in an online interview at Literary Hub. “Perhaps this stance does end up defining my work. If everything I do is relatively anomalous, then nothing is utterly anomalous, since anomaly has become a characteristic trait.”
  “I turned to my mom and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to write dialogues for each of the pairs of chairs?’ What kind of job interview would take place in facing lifeguard chairs? Or in astronaut chairs spinning around a sculpture of a fried egg? Little did I know what I was setting myself up for.”
  MÓNICA DE LA TORRE ON CORPORATESE AND THE OPPRESSION OF FANCY CHAIRS
  POETS ON LIFE AND CRAFT

  April 17, 2017 By Peter Mishler Share:
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  For this third installment in a monthly series of interviews with contemporary poets, Peter Mishler talks to Mónica de la Torre. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse) and Feliz año nuevo, a volume of selected poetry translated into Spanish by Cristián Gómez (Luces de Gálibo) forthcoming in the spring of 2017. Born and raised in Mexico City, she writes about art and is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine. She teaches in the Literary Arts program at Brown University.

  Peter Mishler: Your new collection of poems The Happy End/All Welcome is in response to an art installation by Martin Kippenberger entitled The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” which is “an assortment of numbered tables and office desks with pairs of mismatched chairs within a soccer field flanked by grandstands which references a giant job fair held by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in Kafka’s unfinished Amerika.”

  What originally drew you to Kippenberger’s installation? What qualities of this installation suggested to you that it might be able to sustain a longer written work?

  Mónica de la Torre: It was a part of his 2009 retrospective at MoMA, The Problem Perspective. I was at the show with my mother. I mention this because I’ve noticed that when she visits me my relationship to time shifts a bit. Everything slows down; I allow myself to be a sort of tourist in the city. I’m not rushing from one place to another, not checking off items on my to-do list. So I guess this makes me more open to exterior stimuli. Upon seeing the installation I turned to my mom and said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to write dialogues for each of the pairs of chairs?” What kind of job interview would take place in facing lifeguard chairs? Or in astronaut chairs spinning around a sculpture of a fried egg? Little did I know what I was setting myself up for.

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  The installation appears random and chaotic; there’s no apparent logic to the wild pairings of chairs and tables set up as for the job interview that many townspeople, including Karl Rossmann, the protagonist of Kafka’s Amerika, have with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I was drawn to the installation’s chaos, imaginativeness, and layers, and also to the fact that it allows viewers to identify with many of its components. We recognize certain chairs, types of desks, and bring our own associations to them. Since the job fair in Amerika is set within a soccer field, there’s a parallel with sports culture as well. I admire how Kippenberger riffs off notions of competitiveness, performativity, and one-upmanship, which are not foreign to the poetry world.

  Later I found out that Kippenberger had actually commissioned chapbooks from his writer friends and associates, requesting from them exactly what I was imagining I would do. I figured it was fair game not to read these chapbooks (in part, because I don’t know German), since Kippenberger never read Amerika—his take on Kafka’s book was completely based on hearsay.

  In general, I also feel an affinity toward something that Kippenberger’s art does—each work of his embodies a distinct position regarding the art-making process, a different approach to labor. It’s as if he were interested not only in creating discrete works, but also different artist personae for each type of work. Similarly, I’ve never been interested in committing to a single mode of literary output, or in finding a voice or style that’s recognized as my own, in part because I’m always aware of each mode or style’s limitations. I’m more interested in exploring multiple modes than in pledging allegiance to one of them. I’m as skeptical of dogma as I am of branding. The Happy End of Kafka’s “Amerika” is inherently polyphonic and dialogic, and though it took me a few years to embark on my own project fully, the set of issues the installation deals with are the ones I wanted to explore at the time.

  PM: Do you find yourself creating purposeful conditions for yourself in order to move in a new direction with a new collection? What is it like for you as a poet to start fresh on new writing?

  MDLT: I don’t deliberately set out to try different approaches “for the sake of variety,” though, from the get-go, I push myself to be open to explore where any given project might lead me. Perhaps this stance does end up defining my work. If everything I do is relatively anomalous, then nothing is utterly anomalous, since anomaly has become a characteristic trait. I wonder what would happen if I actually set out to repeat myself? That’d be interesting.

  My favorite part of a new project is the beginning, before I’ve realized what it could become. Once I’m committed to it, I immerse myself, go down the rabbit hole, and get lost. I then must distance myself before I have clarity again. I’ve rarely not needed to interrupt myself. The process is slow and agonizing—a form of strategic procrastination—but it’s ultimately beneficial since by the time I’m done with something I’ve approached it from many different angles and I’ve exhausted its possibilities.

  PM: I’m interested in your use of a more “traditional” metrical poetic line in this work, as well as other instances where there is a prosaic and corporate, ad-copy-like coldness to to the writing. Could you discuss the value of both the poetic and the prosaic in this work?

  MDLT: The more poetic poems are my spin on the lyric. A poet dealing with “emotion recollected in tranquility” would have to be sitting down in, at least, a moderately pleasant setting with a decent view, don’t you think? Impossible to engage in such pursuit while squeezing next to a manspreader in a crowded subway or dodging the oversize bags of a tactically oblivious person. It’s a funny thing, our relationship to the body when engaging in mental activities—our physical self becomes a hindrance of sorts.

  I wanted to research the chairs in the installation and imagine what it’d be like to sit in—they all embody ideals related to taste, interior design, and ergonomics. Some of them Kippenberger had made for him, others he found in flea markets. A third category pertains to 20th-century design classics by Charles and Ray Eames, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Harry Bertoia, Arne Jacobsen (his classic Egg Chair)… the list goes on. I couldn’t recognize all of them. In any case, at some point I decided to forget about identifying them. I had my own chairs to sit in and a new inventory to contribute, since in the middle of writing the book, in 2014, I had the good fortune of being invited by the Lannan Foundation to do a residency in Marfa. The house I got was minimal and had some iconic furniture in it. After a few days, it dawned on me that I’d been sitting on an Eames chair. And that the chair where I dumped my clothes every night was a Rietveld—it could have easily been represented in the installation. I’d looked at pictures of the Kippenberger so many times, but I’d failed to notice that there’s a Donald Judd chair smack in the middle of it. Being in Marfa, I could sit in plenty of Judd chairs if I wanted. The Judd Foundation had lots of the same chairs that were in the installation, and so did Marfa Book Company—I spotted this wacky Gehry armchair there that I’d seen in a picture. It was unreal.

  All of the more poetic poems—with line breaks and discernible patterns—were written in Marfa, in a state of almost complete quietude. It’s as close as I could get to the lyric. (I didn’t seek to write any poems in meter, so whatever happened formally was accidental. I did play with other types of patterns, though.) In terms of the book’s architecture, these poems would provide respite from the prosier material around them, which tackles employment in more overt forms, by emulating questionnaires, interviews, tests, etc. If in the lyric poems there are hardly any found texts, the prosier material is often appropriated and signals a more conceptual or procedural approach.

  PM: In a podcast interview with Charles Bernstein you speak about procedural writing and collage as a way to “shatter subjectivity.” Is this the case with this new work?

  MDLT: I must have meant was that I was interested in “shattering subjectivity” as a way of exposing a subject’s multiplicity. This is not say that a subject’s complexity cannot be represented via one cohesive modality only (the lyric, say). Of course it can and often is. It’s just that I’m more drawn to the polyvocal than to the univocal.

  PM: Kippenberger imagined a happy ending to Kafka’s Amerika. What is the happy end of your book?

  MDLT: The Nature Theater of Oklahoma promises everyone jobs. Whether this is a scam or not is left open, since Kafka never finished the novel. The happy ending in my book goes back to the dream of universal employment in a meta-literary way. I employed all sorts of materials in it: found texts, treasured quotes, one-offs that I would have discarded otherwise, and recycled stuff that I’d written for purposes other than my book (such as blurbs, which one has to write to participate in the poetic economy and often take so much time). I even hired a ghostwriter whose work went beyond anything I could have hoped for. I also put to use errors and typos, following the malapropism in Kippenberger’s title. Everything is welcome; all approaches are redeemed.

  PM: When I think about the characters I imagine in the book, many of them endure the absurdity of corporate culture we’re all familiar with. I am curious about the tension between the “universal employment” of various languages and voices in the book and the inequality and unpleasantness inherent in how corporate culture operates in real life.

  MDLT: It’s the big question at the core of the book. I take materials coming from a culture that is per force stratified, unequal, and often cynical in its goals—and whose discourse is nothing if not blatantly euphemistic—in order to turn it on its head. Not unlike the job fair scene in Amerika, I intend to highlight the ridiculousness of bureaucracy, which isn’t hard to do: bureaucracy involves standardization of the various and mutable by definition, and therefore the creation of categories that always already are insufficient, which in turn inevitably leads to more bureaucratization, and so on.

  So the idea was to détourne some of the very means through which corporate culture coerces us. Take ergonomics, for instance. Herman Miller bills the ubiquitous Aeron chair not as an office chair but as a “performance work chair.” Sexy, no? Its tagline is: “The revolution in ergonomics that’s become a design icon.” I can’t resist the perverse incongruity of the word revolution in there, when the chair’s design is the very embodiment of a preemptive intent to placate revolutionary drives by having people actually enjoy sitting endlessly at their desks!

  In one of my poems the concept of la perruque appears. Michel de Certeau writes about it in The Practice of Everyday Life. It’s a diversionary practice consisting of appearing to be working for an employer when one is working for oneself, and/or of taking advantage of the employer’s resources for personal use. De Certeau’s book is from 1980. He couldn’t have predicted the scale of la perruque in the 21st century, with people spending hours on social media when they’re supposedly at work. So, to your question, the difference between corporate culture as it exists IRL and the way it’s depicted in my book is that I try to subvert it through satire and focus on non-deliverables as opposed to deliverables, to use project management language. That might explain the oddity of some of the positions available: i.e., for a prospective chain smoker or a furniture tester.

  PM: I’m intrigued by final lines of the book: “…this was made but it / wasn’t written. // The next one up is in made-up tongues.”

  MDLT: The last lines in the book are a nod to David Bowie’s Low. I wrote that last poem after he’d passed away. I heard Phillip Glass say at a talk that he and Bowie made music, not write it. I took the statement as a comment on a compositional method that focuses on assembling and manipulating materials more than writing from scratch. The comment on “the next one up” applies both to the following track on Bowie’s album (“Warszawa”) and the next project I’m working on. I struggle with endings. Pointing to what’s next was my way of (not) closing the book.

  chairscorporate absurditydesignFranz Kafkainterviewslives of the poetsMonica de la TorrePeter Mishlerpoetrypoets

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  Peter Mishler
  Peter Mishler

  Peter Mishler’s first volume of poetry, Fludde, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2018.

Quoted in Sidelights: “readers will feel like they have stumbled into a job fair in some alternate universe,” summed up the book as “delightful.”
The Happy End/All Welcome
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p76. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Happy End/All Welcome
Monica de la Torre. Ugly Duckling, $ 17 trade paper (122p) ISBN 978-1-937027-73-5
In this delightful collection, poet and translator de la Torre (Public Domain) literarily extends artist Martin Kippenberger's installation "The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika" which she describes as "an assortment of numbered tables and office desks with pairs of mismatched chairs within a soccer field flanked by grandstands." These formally inventive poems feature job notices, briefs, interview transcripts, and an office furniture inventory; readers will feel like they have stumbled into a job fair in some alternate universe. For example, a manager explains to a consultant that "We don't really have a CEO. We have an Artistic Director. The office chairs surrounding us are ghosts of obsolete hierarchies. We keep them as reminders of what can go wrong." De la Torre presents everything with a straight face, even a hilariously jargon-riddled posting for someone to give a presentation on the value of humor in the workplace. She warps and exaggerates the more ridiculous elements of professional etiquette, start-up culture, and corporate language in ways that encourage readers to look deeper into our work spaces to see how strange they really are. Perhaps, as de la Torre suggests in "Ad Copy," "The mantra of The Happy End! All Welcome might be that slapstick speaks louder than words, the work imploding with what it implies." (Apr.)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Happy End/All Welcome." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 76. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1& id=GALE%7CA487928101&it=r&asid=33887461e8b51b58104a6813e42b4aa3. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928101
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* Reversible Monuments: An
Anthology of Contemporary Mexican
Poetry
Nedra C. Evers
Library Journal.
127.10 (June 1, 2002): p156. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Copper Canyon. Jun. 2002. c.675p. ed. by Monica de la Torte & Michael Wiegers. index. ISBN 1-55659-159-4. pap. $20. POETRY
In Mexico, poets are so highly esteemed that they are considered their country's cultural ambassadors. Many write for daily newspapers, and most are consulted for opinions about politics and social issues. In the United States, on the contrary, poets usually earn their livings as teachers and, "quarantined with [their] writing students" spin their creative wheels by writing to and for academia rather than to society as a whole. Ironically, anthologies of contemporary American poetry--frequently on bestsellers lists in Mexico--go, like the words of prophets, ignored in their own country. If homegrown poetry ranks low on the list of American pastimes, translations of Mexican poetry could rank even lower. De la Torre, a translator and coordinator of literature and visual arts programming at the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and Wiegers, the managing editor at Copper Canyon, hope to change all that. This volume began as an exchange of poets between the United States and Mexico in 1998, sponsored by the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York and the Academy of American Poets. Featuring over 30 contemporary poets (born after or just before 1950), this anthology is a fresh voice from the south of the border. The language and extended metaphors found in many of these poems are original enough to suggest one of Mexico's finest poets, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, or Spain's equally complex Baroque poet Luis de Gongora. Nevertheless, each poet's work is unique, and the syntax of the poetry is unmistakably modern. Many poets are award winners or recipients of Guggenheim fellowships. The bilingual layout is easy to follow; English translations match the original Spanish nearly stanza for stanza. An added feature is the section containing brief biographies of the translators. Recommended for poetry and Spanish-language collections in academic and public libraries.--Nedra C. Evers, Sacramento P.L., CA
Evers, Nedra C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Evers, Nedra C. "* Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry."
Library Journal, 1 June 2002, p. 156. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&
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sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA87780137&it=r& asid=5d2a039118aaca54e2209c165fec3e59. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A87780137
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Quoted in Sidelights: “hilarious” and “deeply cynical,” adding that de la Torre “reminds us that even when cynicism is the only logical response, there are still reasons to believe.”
Public Domain
Publishers Weekly.
256.3 (Jan. 19, 2009): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Public Domain
Monica de la Torre. Roof (SPD, dist.), $13.95 (104p) ISBN 978-1-931824-30-9
In her hilarious, deeply cynical second book, de la Torre (Talk Shows) interrogates language public and private, often directly inviting the reader to participate in parsing authenticity from bullshit: "read into a microphone making all p's pop" is the instruction at the top of one "p"-heavy text. Born in Mexico and reared equally on the high and pop-culture of Latin America and the U.S., de la Torre is especially indebted to the Language poets and the New York contemporary art scene (she is the senior editor of Bomb magazine). These six poems and sequences co-opt various kinds of discourse--the list ("Lists are what you write when you're feeling eager"), the sales presentation ("Our patented Emergency Restraint Chair ... will restrain a combative or self- destructive person who needs to be interrogated or force fed ..."), even e-mail ("believe it or not, my name is also Monica de la Torre')--to show how these forms are misused or can be recontextualized to make new meaning in an age when language has been deeply debased. All the while, de la Torre's own mischievous voice, interspersed, reminds us that even when cynicism is the only logical response, there are still reasons to believe: "This piece might not seem transformed enough to you, but I intend it to be transformative for me." (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Public Domain." Publishers Weekly, 19 Jan. 2009, p. 43. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps
/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA192586545&it=r& asid=b274671d8c9756bb1d33f8618a5de1d9. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A192586545
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Talk Shows
Publishers Weekly.
253.50 (Dec. 18, 2006): p44. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Talk Shows MONICA DE LA TORRE. Switchback (SPD, dist.), $14 paper (76p) ISBN 978-0-9786172-0-2
Accomplished translator de la Torte (Reversible Monuments) draws on frame breaking, self- questioning contemporary art and on her Mexican background in this quirky first collection of her own poems in English. Prose and verse poems assemble memorable, quotable fragments, odd details and estranged claims about a partially obscured self: the opening piece hopes "To rip kites so they may stay on the ground.// To forget jokes and misunderstand common sense." Sometimes cerebral, even jokey in her uses of found texts, sometimes neosurrealist in her fluid shifts of scene and referent, de la Torre's whimsies and passions make her clearly hip, yet hard to place: "Thirst is not fear, thirst is not green, but has wings,/ like dragons, or airplanes." Dialogues feature men and women who talk straight past one another; lyrical series decry "over-protective toddlers," "narcissistic dorks," and "myopic brutes," and a series of short poems (scattered through a longer poem, "Texas") comprise fantasias on single letters: "Slowly soften stiff surfaces, study severity." The very quotable prose poem "On Translation" stands out for its insight, not just into how de la Torre recreates Spanish-language poems in English, but into how she composes English verse of her own: "Not to search for meaning, but to reenact a gesture, an intent." (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Talk Shows." Publishers Weekly, 18 Dec. 2006, p. 44+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps
/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA156551677&it=r& asid=df87e7207f469c992212dcf8a0b7a904. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A156551677
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Reversible Monuments: An Anthology
of Contemporary Mexican Poetry
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
98 (June 1, 2002): p1670. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2002 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Ed. by Monica De La Torre and Michael Wiegers. June 2002. 520p. index. Copper Canyon, paper, $20 (1-55659-159-4). 861.
American readers haven't seen a collection of contemporary Mexican poetry since Mark Strand edited New Poetry of Mexico in 1970, observes Eliot Weinberger, distinguished scholar and translator of Octavio Paz, in his grounding introduction to this unique and substantial bilingual anthology. Since then, an entire "post-Paz generation" of poets has emerged, including the 31 gifted men and women showcased here, most writing in Spanish but some in indigenous languages. Spacious and accommodating, this work presents a generous number of gracefully translated poems by each poet, a felicitous in-depth approach that makes this much more than a sampler, and a sound decision given the poets' propensity for long, dreamy poems. Sensuality is ever-present, as is an intimate connection with nature, both classically pure and, in Efrain Bartolome's poems, under assault. Gods of diverse cultures put in surprising appearances, and many works are metaphysical, although more personal realms are illuminated by Gloria Gervitz and Pedro Serrano, and Josue Ramirez discerns the cosmic on Mexico City streets. This is without doubt a landmark volume, but let's hope that it doesn't stand alone for too long.
YA/L: YA poets and advanced students of Latino culture will brave these sophisticated poems and enjoy the bilingual presentation. DS.
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry."
Booklist, 1 June 2002, p. 1670. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w& u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA88999314&it=r& asid=57ba7bee55b699d09c32e6cd40e4ddb0. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A88999314
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"The Happy End/All Welcome." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 76. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA487928101&asid=33887461e8b51b58104a6813e42b4aa3. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017. Evers, Nedra C. "* Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry." Library Journal, 1 June 2002, p. 156. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA87780137&asid=5d2a039118aaca54e2209c165fec3e59. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017. "Public Domain." Publishers Weekly, 19 Jan. 2009, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA192586545&asid=b274671d8c9756bb1d33f8618a5de1d9. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017. "Talk Shows." Publishers Weekly, 18 Dec. 2006, p. 44+. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA156551677&asid=df87e7207f469c992212dcf8a0b7a904. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017. Seaman, Donna. "Reversible Monuments: An Anthology of Contemporary Mexican Poetry." Booklist, 1 June 2002, p. 1670. Book Review Index Plus, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA88999314&asid=57ba7bee55b699d09c32e6cd40e4ddb0. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.

• Queen Mob's Teahouse
  http://queenmobs.com/2017/06/poetry-review-monica-de-la-torre-happy-end-all-welcome/
  Word count: 1347

  Quoted in Sidelights: “One could … read The Happy End/All Welcome as an elaborate stage piece in which the farcical characters of late capitalism are paraded about.” For all her lampooning of corporate life, he added, de la Torre sees hope. She “is committed to the future, and to be more precise, a particular future, one in which resistance is possible,”
  POETRY REVIEW: Mónica de la Torre’s THE HAPPY END / ALL WELCOME
  15th Jun 2017 In Reviews
  Tags: latinx, Mónica de la Torre, Poetry, review, The Happy End / All Welcome, ugly duckling presse
  by Michael Kirby
  0 Comments
  On The Happy End / All Welcome
  Many on the left have responded to the recent U.S. travel bans by doubling down on multiculturalism. Its doctrine is broadcast in “Positions Available,” the opening poem of Mónica de la Torre’s new collection, The Happy End / All Welcome: “We have a place for everyone, everyone in their place! / Anyone thinking of their future belongs in our midst! / Anyone thinking of their future, their place is with us!”

  However, it seems this language has been co-opted, given that corporations are now more than happy to gesture toward a radical acceptance of difference, as long as the gesture remains tied to a particular notion of futurity (read: you’re welcome in our country barring you don’t threaten our bottom line). This serves two purposes: it appeases those whose politics is solely concerned with representation—that is to say, it appeases those who believe a Muslim or gay CEO is peak radicalism—while also stymying the creation of a global anti-capitalist movement.

  But what of people with no future—those who, unable to live up to Western standards of success, are prohibited from enjoying the “benefits” of a free market? Surely there remains a group outside the capitalist order, against which that order is then defined. De la Torre foregrounds this complication in The Happy End / All Welcome, a collection that dedicates much of its content to illustrating the globalized job market’s almost limitless acceptance of difference, raising yet another question: which aspects of multiculturalism remain inconsumable by the capitalist machine?

  Monica de la Torre

  The Happy End / All Welcome is set in a space inspired by the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, which first appeared in Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika and was later, as the introductory note to the collection states, referenced by Martin Kippenberger in his installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika. A theatre is a fitting point of reference; plays are, after all, a medium exceedingly attuned to the spatial. One could, in fact, read The Happy End / All Welcome as an elaborate stage piece in which the farcical characters of late capitalism are paraded about (here we have the assistant manager, here the assistant to the assistant manager). We, the spectators, are tasked with determining which characters are absented from the space of the theater.

  It isn’t clear who’s barred entry. Women aren’t denied access, as the poem “Ad Copy” provides a substantial list of women who appear throughout the collection: “pinup secretaries, gamines, vamps, aspiring starlets, celebrity lookalikes, fashion hounds, compulsive eyebrow pluckers, shoe fetishists, thrift-store junkies, post-hippie hobos, and even ladies-who-lunch.”

  Nor does it seem as though race or national origin precludes one from participation; a woman is hired despite (or rather because) she speaks in accented English (“My English is…no English”). The recruiter in charge of hiring “remembers the orientation sessions in which talent scouts were told to employ, at the drop of a hat, anyone whose use of language might increase activity in the audience’s corrugator muscles or do the opposite, prompting zygomatic tension.” (The corrugator muscles are used when frowning, the zygomatic when smiling. Recall that the recruiter is supposed to base his or her decisions on an imagined audience’s reaction. This further extends the metaphor of the theater, casting the recruiter in the role of director and the women seeking a job in the role of actor. But who, then, is the audience? We previously suggested that it was us, the readers, but perhaps the true audience may be the indifferent flows of capital, which aren’t concerned with whether we smile or frown, only that the show go on.)

  We can continue this process of subtraction, hoping that we might eventually discover a group that lies outside of capitalism—an abject people—but the point has been made: no such group exists. We are working with(in) a universal system. The connection to Kafka’s Amerika therefore becomes evident: like the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, where everyone is promised a job, the truth of capitalism is that it has completely incorporated this language of difference into its structure. Thus a politics solely concerned with this language (and its endless proliferation) can no longer function as a check to capitalism’s destructive impulses.

  What can we do to resist a system that’s weaponized the language of difference, turned it into a tool for reactionary causes? De la Torre, by turning our attention towards the more universalist aspects of multiculturalism, gives us an answer in the poem “Available Positions”:

  Sitting erect, pelvis curved out, cross-legged or with legs parallel.

  Slumping, pelvis turned in.

  Sitting erect, slightly leaning forward, resting elbows and arms on desk.

  Reclining on chair, propping up feet on desk.

  Here we see that jobs are reduced to the effects they have on various bodies. And one must admit that inhabiting a body is an experience shared by all, and that, furthermore, this shared experience is determined in advance by capital: “Each rehearses a persona, offering a tenderly sardonic look at the art of fashioning oneself.”

  It seems as if de la Torre is using the body to cut across sociological categories such as race and gender, to cut across the very difference that underlies these categories. This is by no means a denial of the importance of race or gender, both of which are tied to the ways in which we view bodies; these phenomena have political import and should be considered when engaging in any sort of critical discussion. Rather, de la Torre seems to be suggesting, along with neo-Marxists like Alain Badiou, that we must resuscitate a form of political engagement that is based on universal truths—the truth that we all inhabit a body, the truth that we are all subjected to the indifferent flows of capital. In short, a universal system of oppression must be met with a universal project of emancipation.

  The Happy End / All Welcome also represents a turn away from certain theorists whose work questions the efficacy of a politics based on an appeal to futurity (Lee Edelman, among others). These theorists, who view capitalism (and the all-pervasive figure of the child that underpins it) as the system most concerned with futurity, and who subsequently advocate for a politics that rejects futurity outright, miss that capitalism doesn’t promise a future to anyone, except, of course, in a limited sense (global oligarchs, the one percent). Their response (“no future”) is merely a nihilist’s acceptance of this fact.

  De la Torre, however, is committed to the future, and to be more precise, a particular future, one in which resistance is possible. This commitment requires something beyond the false radicalism of capitalist multiculturalism, something that perhaps finds inspiration in Paul the Apostle’s famous maxim: “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.” Neither capitalist multiculturalism nor a resurgent fascism. What counts, in that venerable saint’s logic and in the logic of de la Torre, is the new.

  Michael Kirby is a student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and his work, both creative and critical, can be found in Spikes Arts Quarterly, Jacket2, and Best American Experimental Writing 2016. He tweets: @miclkrby.

• Culture Trip
  https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/monica-de-la-torre-the-happy-end-all-welcome-book-review/
  Word count: 1041

  Quoted in Sidelights: “uncanny poetic style.” “Imagine a tutorial video melting as it plays or William Basinski disintegrating his own TED talk and you wouldn’t be too far from de la Torre’s hypnotic and collared verse,” he related. The Happy End/All Welcome, he continued, “highlights how easy it is to cut-and-paste our professional lives and puts a playful and perspicacious spin on that unromantic human condition: the daily grind.”
  Mónica De La Torre's New Poetry Collection Will Make You Rethink Office Culture
  Picture of Michael Barron

  Michael Barron
  Books and Digest Editor
  Updated: 22 March 2017

  The poet and critic investigates modern office culture with the uncanny style of job interviews, tutorial videos, and TED talks.

  To paraphrase Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room in a cushioned, ergonomic chair. Beside me is a pile of books, each mouthing a publicity letter. I am sitting in a room that is lined by long white tables, stationed by several people staring at computer screens, buds in their ears, typing up copy and content much like the kind you are reading now. Behind me is a kitchen filled with cookies and snacks, a fridge stocked with various La Croix seltzers, and a water-cooler currently devoid of a jug. The walls are papered with neon Queen Elizabeths and jungly foliage. In a glassed-in conference room, the HR manager is interviewing a potential employee; they laugh like old friends possibly over a shared joke, or possibly over a discrepancy in the interviewee’s CV. For a brief moment, the aura is dispelled, and the cozy vibe overshadowing this office space is lifted to its reality. This is the system inhabited by the modern worker.

  The accomplished poet and critic Mónica de la Torre’s The Happy End / All Welcome investigates the culture of the modern office using an uncanny poetic style. Imagine a tutorial video melting as it plays or William Basinski disintegrating his own TED talk and you wouldn’t be too far from de la Torre’s hypnotic and collared verse. Taking a page from Martin Kippenberger’s installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, in which the artist visually recreates the writer’s absurd vision of an American job fair, de la Torre goes a step further, looking back at the reader, as a disembodied higher-up would to a lowly employee. But first, one must be hired, an HR conundrum that de la Torre approaches with her enthusiastic carnival barking opener “Positions Available”:

  Anyone thinking of their future belongs in our midst!

  Anyone thinking of their future, your place is with us!

  And we congratulate you here and now those who have decided in our favor.

  If you decide to join us, we congratulate you here and now!

  —THE COMPANY

  But what does it mean to be hired by poetry, really? De la Torre plays to this idea at times like a late afternoon conference room brainstorm session, and at others like the thought-line of an industrious floor manager. “Positions Available” turns into “Available Positions” a meditation on sitting, the first in a series of observations made from various (and quite real) chairs. “the days of sitting around seem extinct” she says from the perch of a Dodo chair; “Not in fetal position, curled up, quite the opposite: spread out, yet fully supported, encouraged, in fact” she writes from a Womb chair. Some chairs offer comfort and power, others prohibit them.
  Mónica de la Torre © Bruce Pearson

  Mónica de la Torre | © Bruce Pearson

  The Happy End / All Welcome is rife with these kinds of variations, which include interviews, case studies, and advertisements, but like any good use of bureaucracy, it goes with the flow of its own logic. Rather than exemplify an office-space-like Kafkaesque nightmare, de la Torre commandeers the mouthpiece management speak, making absurdist pronouncements under the guise of forms and questionnaires, as she does in the connected work “YES OR NO”, a set of eight poems that share the affirmative or negative title, and create a survey of the workplace that would be at home in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King:

  A dead office is overhead.

  A living office is an organism.

  Partitions need less maintenance than plants.

  Bees are not natural and that is natural enough.

  If unchecked, workers dillydally to slow down operations.

  Restrooms are not plazas.

  Water-coolers are plazas.

  De la Torre has an ingenious knack for exploring every nook and cranny of a constraint. In this, the theme of the office may run throughout the collection, but the collection does not stay seated, as it were, in the cubicle of the theme. In one poem she conceives of using found poetry for one job application (jingle writer); for a different company position (spiritualist) she conjures the texts of The I Ching and language artist Xul Solar. She lines up the duties for subversive guerrilla advertisers that includes scrambling mobile phone signals, and gets philosophical with the qualifications of a short-sighted lifeguard: “if you avert your eyes from something your eyes can’t help but see, are you seeing it or not?”

  What emerges is a collection of poems that highlights how easy it is to cut-and-paste our professional lives and puts a playful and perspicacious spin on that unromantic human condition: the daily grind. Thinking back to the observed job interview, we’ve all been there, wondering what it would be like to work at a specific company. Once we’re in, no matter how cozy it might seem, we wonder what it would like to be elsewhere, where the perks might be perkier, the Popchips poppier, but by the end of the day, the entire workforce can relate on two things: the desire to go home and have a job to come back to in the morning.

  THE HAPPY END / ALL WELCOME
  by Mónica De La Torre
  Ugly Duckling Presse | 128 pp | $17.00 (£14.00)

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/poetry/nathaniel-rosenthalis-who-cares-what-future-brings
  Word count: 2939

  Quoted in Sidelights: “De la Torre has produced a wild deadpan blitz, but for all its conceptual attitudes, it would be a mistake to overlook the humanist core of her enterprise, which is to form counteroffers to capitalism’s destructive procedures and habits of minds,” observed Nathaniel Rosenthalis in the Boston Review‘s online edition. “It is to this end that de la Torre subverts recognizable form, reorienting the performance of author, voice, and utterance in a way that constitutes an extraordinary striking of our usual lyric sets.”
  The Happy End / All Welcome
  Mónica de la Torre
  Ugly Duckling Presse, $17 (paper)

  Mónica de la Torre’s new book, The Happy End / All Welcome, reinvents that rarest of poetic subjects: the job fair. Its prefatory note presents the book as a response to German artist Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), a large-scale sculptural work consisting of “an assortment of numbered tables and office desks with pairs of mismatched chairs within a soccer field flanked by grandstands.” Widely considered Kippenberger’s masterpiece, the installation is itself a reconceiving of the enormous job fair hosted by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma in the final chapter of Franz Kafka’s (characteristically) unfinished novel Amerika, which Kippenberger claimed never to have read. Thus de la Torre puts the reader in a position (even before we read the first poem) to think back to the book’s sources and about what a source is, to consider the nature of a referential remove and to ask what effect, if any, such a layered accrual of removals has on our experience of a text. We also might ask what it means to refer back to something with the ontological wispiness of the open-ended—open-ended because unfinished, like the novel, or else undefined, like the job fair in the novel, said to be so expansive that no one knows where it ends.

  The achievement of The Happy End / All Welcome might be how far it goes to make institutional critique inextricable from representation of subjectivity.

  De la Torre’s book-length fantasia on themes such as these (and others) is likewise expansive and inclusive. We encounter in The Happy End / All Welcome an unusual variety of familiar and unfamiliar chair types and odd job interviews and application processes. The poems take the forms of questionnaires, self-aware ad copies about the book itself, and typing and rapid reading tests, to name a few. The Happy End / All Welcome has no table of contents, which emphasizes the way that the book is meant to be walked through with no sense beforehand of what lies ahead. De la Torre has produced a wild deadpan blitz, but for all its conceptual attitudes, it would be a mistake to overlook the humanist core of her enterprise, which is to form counteroffers to capitalism’s destructive procedures and habits of minds. It is to this end that de la Torre subverts recognizable form, reorienting the performance of author, voice, and utterance in a way that constitutes an extraordinary striking of our usual lyric sets.

  Part ekphrasis, part theatrical production, de la Torre’s book stages often hilarious exchanges. Part of her gift as a writer is comedic timing, manipulating recognizable situations and the vocabulary they provide to release minor affects such as frustration, annoyance, skepticism, and embarrassment. Take “Table 20,” the first job interview in the book:

  Bather:

  If you can see what you can’t see, does that
  mean you’re seeing it?

  Aspiring Lifeguard:

  I see shapes, not edges.

  Bather:

  Meaning?

  Aspiring Lifeguard:

  Meaning:

  Bather:

  Astigmatism, you mean?

  Aspiring Lifeguard:

  Nothing I can’t just ignore.

  Bather:

  There you go, getting everything confused again.

  The opening paradox unfolds in puns, double meanings, double negatives. The poem’s comedy is sly, working on the discrepancy between the waffling of the applicant and the position in question—one that requires an ability to recognize warning signs and distress signals and to intervene with direct action. In a nod to Kafka’s awkward and equivocating protagonist, the Aspiring Lifeguard’s evasiveness wears the Bather’s nerve thin:

  Bather:

  Do you trust your other senses?

  Aspiring Lifeguard:

  It depends on where I’m sitting.

  Bather:

  Do you want the position or not?

  These personae can never be confused with a typical lyric speaker; no straightforward lyrical “I” appears in the book—instead, interiority is displaced, and made to speak in different masks and appropriated tongues. The interview pairings are giddy, delightful: a caterer and a line cook (“I’m a believer in readymade flavor”), a Human Resources Manager and “a candidate for the position of Armchair Psychologist or Pop Freudianist,” a Company Manager and a Consultant (“the rule of thumb is: Shun primitive behavior, welcome primitive impulses”), and an Artistic Director and an applicant who identifies as “a very strategic, enterprising procrastinator.” The mask is always one of many—a role taken on in the felt presence of a choral company.

  What these various characters share is their positions as performers of tasks. In “View from an Aeron Chair,” the office chair becomes the occasion for a contemplation of the simple act of sitting:

  The sky’s changeups are reminders
  that this will not drag on forever, despite
  the ergonomic ease afforded by the seat
  first devised for geriatric care, then stripped down.
  It’d seem rational: if the elderly spent
  their days in recliners, so could others,
  dotcommers, say, properly incentivized.

  Observing how the young and old alike spend their time in passive positions in chairs, either because of bodily need or because of a desk job, the poem notes the devouring nature of capitalism. “We will be priced out of any arena,” the poem continues:

  . . . we’ll come to realize
  the sense in having new places to leave.
  This is the chair’s democracy.
  Particularly this one, with its form-fitting mesh
  forsaking foam and padding,
  which cause overheating and cloud
  the sitter’s judgment.
  It’s recyclable, and that matters.

  The irony is pitch perfect in the poem’s closing one-liner: “Still, the office chair’s revolution is an oxymoron.” The book does not offer a direct vision of what a political revolution would be, but rather animates all sorts of strategies of daily resistance, such as wasting corporate time or redirecting company resources for personal non-profitable tasks. As one poem puts it, “It may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time.’”

  Part ekphrasis, part theatrical production, Mónica de la Torre’s book stages often hilarious exchanges.

  The inability to imagine a different future is part of the humor and gravity of the everyday drama of this, and our, world. Neither jobseeker nor manager can extricate themselves from the system that offers dead-end jobs, nor do they necessarily even want to. By way of example: “Career Track” offers, in a curiously friendly way, a series of questions that aim to assess the reader’s feelings about office work: “Did you start quietly at the very bottom and try to work your way up bit by bit?” “Did you start at an age in which the more advanced of your peers were almost ready to move on to better jobs?” The poem ends with an outline of the ideal job where you “might one day sit as a worker at your desk and look out of your open window with no worries, for a while.” That we can identify this boring desk job as potentially dreamy becomes part of the book’s irony, and part of its repurposing of ready-made picturesque images.

  The achievement of The Happy End / All Welcome might be how far it goes to make institutional critique inextricable from representation of subjectivity. The poems draw on aural and visual dimensions to make us play along—at “Table 21,” the scene has been vacated. We do not encounter an exchange between typist and a test-giver, just the typing test itself, errors and all:

  To give your [sales] letters cgaracter, you should: take a personal attitude, adapt your letter to the reader’s background, education or station in life; keep your temper; avoid sarcasm or witticisms; remind rather than instryct. Or, you can fgoret about these five points and summarize the principles into: “Be sincere.” (1020 strokes–4’, 28”)

  The stumbling of fingers on a keyboard performs an unmistakable sincerity. Clearly, the directive to “be sincere”—consummately personal and polished—is so manufactured as to make sincerity a virtual impossibility. It is a paradoxical position, one that applies to the workplace but also outside as well. As one of the four self-referential poems called “Ad Copy” puts it:

  The girls in The Happy End / All Welcome make up a cast of recognizable characters, all ventriloquizing advertising copy and striving to be unique and desirable. Each gets their soliloquy: pinup secretaries, gamines, vamps, aspiring starlets, celebrity lookalikes, fashion hounds, compulsive eyebrow pluckers, shoe fetishists, thrift-store junkies, post-hippie hobos, and even ladies-who-lunch.

  It is quite a list. Moreover: “Each [girl] rehearses a persona, offering a tenderly sardonic look at the art of fashioning oneself.” This bitter position is central to de la Torre’s poetics, and her critique—the way that a workplace, and the larger social world, can put us in reactive positions. We perform in an underlying economy.

  Of course, the problem of institutional critique, at least in an art historical context, is that the mighty institution (i.e., a museum) tends to absorb (display, document, archive, etc.) the artwork that critiques it. Part of the way de la Torre responds to this problem is by constructing a constant winking presence of self-awareness. Another “Ad Copy” describes the book as “self-documenting,” and “self-recording craze, preemptive of its own critique.” Another adds:

  The customer is always right and let the latest installment of the polyphonic, sprawling The Happy End / All Welcome be the proof of the pudding. No longer the passive, voiceless victims of draconian capitalist forces, consumer culture allows us to exercise the subjectivity we’ve been granted via interpolation (see Barbara Kruger’s “I shop therefore I am”) by talking back to the machine. [60]

  De la Torre’s omnivorous vision can absorb any material: found language, contemporary art references, academic glossing (“polyphonic” “interpolation”). The poem “View from a Folding Chair,” one of the most striking poems in the collection, takes this devouring nature to its extreme, turning the occasion of sitting around to an almost annihilated point. The poem uses a list structure to pull out all the funny qualities and happenstance positions of the plastic folding chairs that appear at public events, auditoriums, wherever entertainment and attention are sold. Comedic wryness ensues: “Rarely will it hold the sitter captive. Its precariousness invites walkouts, even when the seat is secured by an admittance fee.” The view from the chair then becomes strange:

  Irreverent, whether in an institutional setting or not, signaling
  reversible orders.

  Possibly carnivalesque, displaying an upside-down world as in:

  a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit
  surrounding an old ice plant in the desert
  requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room;
  ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the
  planet—
  with no search engine logo and copyright date camouflaged
  to appear like a wisp of a stratus cloud—

  The list offers us “moving images to experience, but not keep.” Progressing in its world-rotating perspective, folding chairs are “unsung, stacked, piled against the wall, or hidden in closets,” and “will be counted on again since, plastic palace people, they’re both transience and ritual.” The future tense here is important. The poem ends ominously, almost like a prophecy: “Welcome into the fold. Who cares what the future brings.” This tonal shift is extraordinary, and thrilling, because it signals both a kind of sneer and a total detachment—the question is a statement, an indictment of the capitalist paradigm where spectators find continual incentive and reward for passivity.

  The Happy End / All Welcome shares some of the framing and appropriation-based strategies of Latin American writers such as Juan Luis Martínez and Ulises Carrión.

  The ominousness of “View from a Folding Chair” and the book’s sprawling miscellany are not merely a coincidence. In terms of lineage, The Happy End / All Welcome shares some of the framing and appropriation-based strategies of Latin American writers such as Juan Luis Martínez and Ulises Carrión. It also bears a fascinating resemblance to the prophetic books of Hebrew prophets (see Thomas Jemielity’s 1992 Satire and the Hebrew Prophets). These prophetic books took the form of hodgepodge assemblage: lists, prayers, parables, apocalyptic announcements, riddles, dialogues, monologues, predictions, and more. De la Torre’s book offers comparable instances of these forms. Take “View from a Folding Chair”—with its list structure and chilling open-endedness, we can call it an anti-prayer. Or take the word scramble, offered without comment at “Table 28”: “IDHSELZ // PFMORRE // UTNTLIO // BNAAANS.” Or the job posting in “Seeking” that calls for “Naturopaths to cure nonspecific symptoms. / Group polarizers. / Encryptors and motivational speakers / to attack The Hostile Network, form mesh-like others.” At “Table 45,” we encounter an app in development for users “to log dreams that might eventually be reenacted,” and the five “Case Study” poems that follow are sample dreams, all based in different kinds of dread, including one that features “a baker’s stall displaying hearty-looking loaves with reliefs of words on them.”

  The subject tries to read one: it could say either PAN or PAIN, but the loaf is cut
  in half and only a portion of the word is legible. The next day the subject goes back to the
  market, and asks the baker what a new loaf says. He answers it spells HUNGER. Or was
  it HOMBRE, or HAMBRE? The subject cannot recall.

  Each of the dreams has an eerie urgency to it that relates to some larger question—here, it is about the slippage, linguistic and otherwise, between man (hombre) and hunger (hambre). What these poems have in common is that their wit is a response to a crisis of social structure. As noted by the Furniture Tester at the end of “View from a Monobloc Chair”: “It seems like yesterday when she spotted a couple of Monoblocs at a table where the people had left signs of preferring Scrabble over texting or browsing the internet while sitting around.” In the way this and other poems here call out distraction and disconnection, they possess a reparative edge. De la Torre is obsessed with leisure time and workplace environment, with the objects of the administered world as they condition human intimacy.

  De la Torre’s inclusive poetics is all about sharing the stage, as shown by this book’s vast cast of ventriloquized characters. This sense of collectivity, of collectively implicated displaced persons, manifests in a wide and vivid range, from worried job applicants whose “English is not very well” to the Furniture Tester who “goes on sitting in uncomfortable chairs.” The other collective presence in the book is the hosts of the job fair, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a.k.a. “The Company,” who open and close the book. In the final poem, hilariously named, “OK, This Is It,” the Company acknowledges the absurdity of all that has occurred:

  We cannot tell you what it is because we don’t have a definition for it.

  Defining it would be as ludicrous as attempting to list the attributes of cloud formations worth looking at. While busying ourselves with enumerating them, the shapes would’ve already changed.

  You might be thinking, Why not take pictures then? Surely they would come in handy!

  Our reply, “Yes, flatten and section the sky into rectangles! And throw in the earth as well!”

  The Company’s disdain for this classic poetic symbol and leisure activity serves as a launching point to articulate what the Company finds worth their time. “See, for us, it could be objects. / Odd chairs. / An egg or a dream. / Pictures on canvas or screens.” The air of summary is made crisp by clarification of the method: “We followed contradictions and our intuition (carefully calibrating randomness.)” The book has done more than that, however. De la Torre has given us a vital work by creating a structure that does not prioritize the single vexed lyric speaker but instead accommodates a range of pointed voices; by displacing the expressive voice in a way that expresses the bitter pull of our dread and the range of our laughter; by calling attention to the mechanisms by which we speak—as well as write and read—and by which we give credence. Her achievement is this brilliantly irresistible provocative body of work. The Happy End / All Welcome repackages the logically organized methods and madness of our time.

• The Volta
  http://www.thevolta.org/fridayfeature-publicdomain.html
  Word count: 2503

  Quoted in Sidelights: “an identity poet,” remarked Volta online reviewer Rosa Alcalá, going on to explain: “Her identity poetry may not be what has been narrowly understood as such, but it nonetheless engages in explorations of the self within society, employing performative and experimental techniques—such as Conceptual, Oulipian, and Dadaist procedures and appropriations—to break down or question, rather than re-affirm, existing notions of a certain identity or group affiliation.”
  “a good dose of sharp humor.”
  Reviewed February 17, 2012 by Rosa Alcalá*.
  "Sorry, but more than one, it is always necessary to be more than one in order to speak,
  several voices are necessary for that..." (Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom)

  Admit it. You Google yourself. What are you looking for? A mention on someone's blog? Some type of recognition that you exist beyond the confines of your office? What are you avoiding? Grading papers? Facing your fears? Whatever the mundane and existential reasons that lead us to search for our selves, our names are the vehicle. They are the extension of our bodies in the world, how others know us, our origins and on-going documentation. Yet, how many share our names? The young woman murdered by her husband in California? The track star? Their existence both disconcerts and intrigues us; they are nothing like us, yet we feel connected to them in some way.

  The last poem in Mónica de la Torre's Public Domain, "Doubles," explores this very issue: the problem of expectations surrounding who we are; our connections and disconnections with others who might be like us. She achieves this by following the correspondence of an Argentine woman raised in Spain, Mercedes Correche, who searches on the Internet for her mother, "Mónica de la Torre." Her mother, Correche explains, returned to Argentina from Spain when Mercedes was two and disappeared after being accused by the Argentine government of subversive activities. The series of email exchanges, with the subject line "abandoned," are between Correche and various people named Mónica de la Torre, all who turn out not to be her mother—from a "transsexual top model" in Veracruz, México, whose English is, by her own estimation, "no good," to a high school cheerleader in the U.S. who gets bad grades in Spanish class. The email exchanges between Correche and these de la Torres become like split screens of miscommunication in an Almodóvar film.

  While all the Mónica de la Torres claim some relation to Spanish-speaking cultures, their overt demographic differences exemplify how a name might stand for certain false expectations of, or sense of unity amongst, those with the same designation. It reminds us of Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, in which she writes,

  We saw an electric sign moving around a building and it said Gertrude Stein
  has come and that was upsetting. Anybody saying how do you do to you and
  knowing your name may be upsetting but on the whole it is natural enough
  but to suddenly see your name is always upsetting. Of course it has happened
  to me pretty often and I like it to happen just as often but always it does give
  me a little shock of recognition and non-recognition. It is one of the things
  most worrying in the subject of identity. (qtd. in Spahr, 36).

  What Stein comes to realize, Juliana Spahr explains, is that "naming, the thing that she once thought defined a person, [is] flexible and variable" (37).

  Similarly, what worries "Doubles," is how the presumed identity of "Mónica de la Torre" shifts from one person to the other, yet each person with that common Spanish-sounding name is trapped by what others expect of them. "I am sick," writes one of the de la Torres, "of receiving sales calls and junk mail in Spanish! If your last name is Hungarian does that mean that AT&T will send you Hungarian promotional material?" Another stateside de la Torre, revealing her own limited notions of Argentine culture shaped by American marketing, says to Mercedes, "I love dulce de leche Hagen Daas ice cream, isn't it from the same place as you?" We ask, too, what is expected of a poet with a Spanish-sounding name like Mónica de la Torre? What do we expect of someone from the U.S. with that name, or from Latin America, or Spain? What assumptions do we make? How does marketing (of frozen desserts, of literature, of cultures) shape those assumptions?

  Also important to note in “Doubles” is that some of the characters Correche corresponds with are "Mónicas," while others are "Monicas." This small, yet acute, accent doesn't just indicate a different set of vowel sounds, it designates a cleave, a crack, separating them. Still, their desire and ability to communicate in both languages via the Internet, to find common ground, also suggests a relationship that persists despite the fact that none of these women are Mercedes Correche's genetic kin, despite their dissimilarities.

  And, of course, one must consider how this Internet-aided correspondence upsets or complicates further any notion of identity or group affiliation: any of these Mó/onica de la Torres can be impostors, presenting an altered or completely invented persona, posting photos of someone else, creating a background foreign to their own. Does that make their connection to each other and to Correche any less real or productive?

  In the sense that she examines the construction of identity, we can call de la Torre, the author of Public Domain, an identity poet. Her identity poetry may not be what has been narrowly understood as such, but it nonetheless engages in explorations of the self within society, employing performative and experimental techniques—such as Conceptual, Oulipian, and Dadaist procedures and appropriations—to break down or question, rather than re-affirm, existing notions of a certain identity or group affiliation. In doing so, she questions authenticity, while still allowing for those multiple affinities that occur between and amongst groups of various origins.

  De la Torre’s employment of collaged texts and procedural poetic forms, as a means to explore identity and the multi-vocal, multi-situational self, continues the work of her first book, Talk Shows. Two poems from this collection, “Bite its Heart Until It Learns,” and “Poem in Spanish,” are centos that bring together lines from several canonical Latin American poets, which she then translates into English. These poems remind one of Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, in the way the poet establishes a dialogue with literary masters, but at the same time displaces their origins by cobbling their work with her own and by migrating them into English. We find in both books this bilingual mediation, the translator and poet working through each poem as if some original existed in another language; one hears these traces and fragments of Spanish or English continually pushing through the surface of the other. As she writes in “On Translation,” another poem in Talk Shows, the point isn’t to “search for meaning, but to reenact a gesture, an intent.” And this reenactment called translation—or poetry, or language—is endless, as she reveals in the poem’s final lines. Here, the translator is taking a picture of the poet she translates, after an afternoon of listening to him recall his dreams (despite his “disillusionment with Freud”). He “greets posterity with a devilish grin,” but the camera, as the translator is well aware, has no film, and he is forced to repeat the pose several times. There is delight in this seemingly unproductive exchange, and, one could say, in all the games de la Torre revels in when she aims her camera at language.

  It is no surprise, then, that Public Domain continues to explore the complex economic and social system within which language functions. Like notions of Latino-ness sold as dulce de leche ice cream, we are made aware of the circularity of identity and economy, of language and identity as an economy. In the anaphoric poem "$6.82,” which begins each line with "My economy," the speaker moves through a dense network in which she chooses her currency and is at the same time dependent upon an existing rate of exchange. Take for example the line, "My economy is language." It is this negotiation of language—as both newly-minted and well-worn currency, as volatile market controlled by external forces and dependable product—that humbly leads us to realize how difficult it is to master, to feel at ease with our investments.

  De la Torre expands on this point, with a good dose of sharp humor, by creating a series of poems, grouped as "Imperfect Utterances," that exemplify "the difficult art of public speaking," particularly in the realm of the poetry reading. The first poem in this series, "Plosive Letter (To read into a microphone making all p's pop)," is an open letter to "Estimado Sr. Presidente," written in Spanish. This public address, aimed, we assume, at the President of the United States, condemns unfair immigration policies and public attitudes directed at undocumented workers in the U.S. As a kind of intervention on behalf of those workers, the poem, with its explosive and persistent p's, is both performance and protest. We can imagine the reader popping and cracking her p's (represented in bold in the text) at the microphone, thus amplifying the political and personal discomfort such issues cause when raised publically. Similarly, the use of Spanish, directed at a mainly English-speaking audience, denotes the indispensable nature of Spanish speakers within the U.S. economy, even as it upsets the hegemony of English. In turn, the audience's inability to fully grasp the message—or its annoyance at a less than polished delivery—may, therefore, lead to inaction or disregard. As such, De la Torre's score makes physical the explosive potential inherent in articulating these national and linguistic tensions.

  Referencing Shusaku Arakawa, de la Torre also maps out the relationship between the public and private by making evident the blanks, erasures, and refusals that allow these two realms to co-exist, or even replace or transform, each other. Such is the case, certainly, with lyric poetry, which insists on the willingness of the poet to make public the private, but with a good dose of "blank"—call it white space, dashes, elliptical evasions, fragments. The reader, then, determines what is not being said "completely," by drawing meaning from what is being said. De la Torre's playful employment of blanks in the first poem of Public Domain, "Is to Travel Getting to or Being in a Destination," places at least partial responsibility of the poem—not just its interpretation, but its existence—on the reader. For each section of the poem, she begins with an anecdote regarding a recent trip out West, but frames these not as parts of the poem, but as documents or experiences that might lead to a poem. For several, the poem that is to come of this travel is left to the reader. For example, in the poem's third section, she writes, "I overheard a guy at the Grand Canyon Lodge say, 'I figured out this trip is all about erosion.' Who likes to overhear things? This poem is about overhearing:" The colon is then followed by a white expanse, taking two inches of the page. In that expanse is not a poem, but a silence (an erosion) we fill in with our own "overhearing," our translation of the blank. In other words, the poem, like all territorial expansions, could not be completed by just one person. That de la Torre insists on the reader's involvement reminds us of Édouard Glissant's ethical reminder: "This is not a passive participation. Passivity plays no part in Relation" (137).

  De la Torre’s use of blanks or erasures also reveals her own worries of what poetry should or can say. She does this by removing the vowels in a piece that begins, "wrry tht ths prjct hs nthing t d wth wht's gng n n my lf," and builds with a list of events, both personal and political, that the speaker fears are not being addressed in her work. In its ever-enlarging font, the poem worries itself breathless, unable to sing beautifully its existential or worldly concerns. All it does is spit out hard consonants, tiring the reader with its impermeable, yet growing, presence. She ends with the perfectly decipherable and vowel-filled: "If 'war does not sing,' it makes noise."

  Underneath the crackle of consistent consonant anxiety the poem unloads, is a larger worry, present and clear; a worry that connects us all. In Public Domain, we are always at war—in Iraq, yes, but also in other realms, and with ourselves. Alluding to Adorno's famous question of whether lyric poetry is possible after Auschwitz, de la Torre's book enters a larger conceptual field that continues to ask this question, falling thus into the tradition, as Dale Smith points out, of "poets who desire to engage with issues of public relevance [by abandoning] the lyric in favor of satire, social documentation, modernist assemblage, and other strategies of poetic engagement." And de la Torre seems to fret a lot about lyric poetry's failures— to capture the complexities of identity, to really sing the self, to engage and collaborate with others, to be political, to articulate both the personal and the public— by instead appropriating (and sometimes pretending to appropriate) material from newspapers, websites, and other sources. In doing so, De la Torre appropriates public voices that in poems become easily confused with her own voice, or takes on different characters that seem very unlike her. Or, she performs many voices at once, sometimes overlapping and thus overtaking the singular poetic speaker we have come to expect. In doing so, Public Domain—and De la Torre’s work in general—reconfigures identity and authorship, constructing a new kind of lyric subject, one that acknowledges the myriad relations ordinarily hidden under the guise of “identity,” one that coincides with the noise of war and public unrest.

  Works Cited

  De la Torre, Mónica. Public Domain. New York: Roof Books, 2008.
  — —. Talk Shows. Chicago: Switchback Books, 2006.
  Derrida, Jacques. "Sauf le nom." Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. On the Name. Ed.
  Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. 33-85.
  Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University
  of Michigan Press, 1997.
  Smith, Dale, "'Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz'?: Kent Johnson and Political Satire."
  Jacket 37: Early 2009.
  Spahr, Juliana. Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Connective
  Identity. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2001.

  *This review first appeared in On: Contemporary Practice 2 (2010)
  ***

  Rosa Alcalá's most recent book is Undocumentaries. She teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso.

  (The Volta | Friday Feature)

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