Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeas cordilleras de sargazo

Antonio Ochoa was born in Mexico City. He has published two books of poems, pulsos and El toro de Hiroshima. He is the editor of Selected Poems & Selected Essays of Eduardo Milán. He hosts the podcast Texts for Nothing: Conversations with Poets. He lives in Massachusetts.

“[Ochoa’s] 'multiplicities' begin with, and return to, literal meditations on the spiral and unravel into something more expansive and riveting, a compelling sequence that moves like a lyric essay, embodying literary and linguistic criticism, morphing between myth and anecdote, between cosmos and earth, between characters of the speaker’s daily life and those of his reading life.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub“These shimmering poems are sustained by a mysterious, expansive energy that merges the horizontal with the vertical, the everyday with the numinous.”—Chloe Aridjis“Small Sargasso Mountains integrates everything, seizing the distinctions between genre, measure, verse, and enjambment. The result is a lyric that spiralizes the discontinuity of the world.”—Eduardo Milán“Swirling with spiral forms—oil slicks, galaxies, bull horns—Small Sargasso Mountains evinces, explains, and generates its own iterative compositional process. By translating back and forth between Spanish and English, Ochoa allows the languages to torque, distort and refine one another in a deep and depthless isomorphy.”—Kate Colby“Objective correlatives advance Small Sargasso Mountains, a philosophically intelligent and alchemical-driven epic. Ochoa’s sequences—sometimes personal, sometimes objective—reveal and unravel polarities and dualities not unlike the effects of a kaleidoscope. You can’t read it just once.”—Kevin McLellan"Spirals, concentric circles . . . the first spin outward, the latter multiply inward. But how to tell apart inside from outside? For me, the image is a language coiled inside another language, itself coiled inside the other language. It is the perpetually undulating Möbius strip of the self-translator, for whom the interior and exterior edges of the languages put in relationship with one another are not only constantly alternating, but also widening and contracting."—Mónica de la Torre