Welcome, everyone.
Thanks for coming tonight.
Lee Ann Brown writes of Monica de la Torre's collection Talk
Shows, her poetry deconstructs sets
of beliefs about what it means to be
a multidimensional subject and turns
markers of gender and race on their so-called years.
Identity and gender politics are folded neatly into smart disses
and observations on the specifics of cultural play
and gaffe, making this a book to be reckoned with.
And I agree.
This reckoning is crucial to our experience as readers
of de la Torre's poems with a complex vaudevilles
or landscape, we are begged to question our perceptions
and preconceptions of voice, translation, communication,
and the performance of talk and utterance.
Much of de la Torres work offers us
a mixed media tape of telenovelas, The New York
Times best seller list, guides on how to dress well, essays
and articles, not to mention the multiple languages and dialects
working within the poems as well.
De la Torre confronts these intricacies
in the poem on translation.
The translator knows that nothing the poet has ever
said or written reveals as much about him
as the expression on his face when he was
asked to pose for a picture.
He greets posterity with a devilish grin.
To the translators delight, he's forced to repeat the gesture
at least three or four times.
The camera has no film.
De la Torre smartly acknowledges the flimsiness
of the original in our information
saturated, conflated in multi-voice world.
Her work engages the reader with its urgency in this way,
and its accrual of meaning through various facets
of culture and playful complications of language.
Not to say that de la Torre's work alienates the self,
rather the self becomes collective
in sensations of both the visceral and surreal.
In her poem Skin Is Warm, 31 Nudes,
de la Torre pushes us into the collective space.
I am many seen from behind.
Black is white, plastic turning.
I will lie.
We are not different, faced with a stain.
Monica de la Torre's poetry collections
include Acufenos, a collection of poems in Spanish published
in Mexico City, Talk Shows, her first book of poems written
in English from Switchback books,
and Public Domain from Roof Books released
earlier this month.
She is also co-author of the artist's book Appendices,
Illustrations and Notes from SmartArt Press.
She has translated numerous translations.
With Michael Wiegers, she edited the anthology Reversible
Monuments, Contemporary Mexican Poetry in 2002
from Copper Canyon Press.
She was born and raised in Mexico City
and has lived in New York since 1993,
where she is senior editor at BOMB Magazine.
Please join me in welcoming Monica de la Torre.
[APPLAUSE]