Transversal

UrayoÁn Noel is a Puerto Rican poet, performer, translator, and critic living in the Bronx, New York. He is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

Transversal is what would happen if MallarmÉ and Sarduy met cruising on Crane's Brooklyn bridge; if Pietri and Delaney had gone to the march and talked shit on every colonizer; if poems as constellations met poems as remakes and disidentifications were also counteridentifications; and if every classroom were itself in three places: a stage, a cipher, and a living room. I read this book many times. The first was moving between languages. The second, in English. La tercera, en espaÑol. The fourth, somewhere scattered. Never in that order. In fact, in fact, if language could do everything I ever wanted it to do and then some, it would be this here book. I mean. This. Read it, if you can, and if you can't, read it too."" - Raquel Salas Rivera, author of x/ex/exis, 2018 Ambroggio Prize""UrayoÁn Noel is one of the most innovative poets writing today. This book transgresses the lines of translation and transcreation, while also transversing the coordinates of the translingual and the transhemispheric. Throughout, Noel interweaves languages (English, Spanish, and Spanglish) and poetic forms (both traditional and improvisational) to express an archipelagic relationality, a stateless sovereignty, and a queer Boricua imaginary. Ultimately, he shows us how the 'transversal is the light that binds us transversal es la luz que nos une.'"" - Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold""These masterful poems advance along tracks that sometimes run parallel, sometimes overlap, sometimes intersect, all the while creating a third thing, the unwritten but still somehow read poem that exists between and across two languages, cutting, indeed, a transversal line. Este brujo cruza mi lectura con palavers y palabras hasta que me desenlazo de blanqueamiento y me encuentro de nuevo at 'the limits of language.' There 'We're millions and so are you' already whispering an italics inside you, lujo-austerity-embrujo-augury-desdibujo-apogee."" - Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse