| "Almost Obscene" is Gómez Jattin’s English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space—precisely the unpredictability that made Gómez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West’s narrow definitions of queer poetics. Olivia Lott on "The Worshipping God" |
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Four Scholars on "The Waste Land" at 100
"Newly resonant in our moment are the poem’s desertified, rocky landscape, its unburied corpses, its polluted air, its 'dry sterile thunder without rain,' its rivers sunken or sweating oil and tar or strewn with garbage, its accusation of the culpable reader, its diffused sense of catastrophe on a global scale, and its refusal to pretend that the losses it mourns can be redeemed."
via LITHUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Cindy Juyoung Ok on Kim Hyesoon's "After All the Birds Have Gone"
"Stanzas and whole poems refuse the unit of the sentence, creating new syntax and refusing to designate themselves relevant to the constructs of past, present, or future. Kim’s is a poetry of present aftermath—of the annihilation absolute but not completed, of the past yet also ongoing. Although the source text of 'After All the Birds Have Gone' is in the present tense, its frame of reference is of survival, invoking the past, while the implied conditional hints at the future." |
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