Gabriel Ojeda-Sague - Madness

Nightboat Books encourages you to calibrate your text size using the line of characters below: Lorem ipsum dolor eros amet, consectetur adipiscing ac mi aliquet magna. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. MADNESSby GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUNIGHTBOAT BOOKSNew YorkCopyright 2022 by Gabriel Ojeda-SaguAll rights reservedPrinted in the United StatesPrint ISBN: 978-1-64362-117-3Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-136-4Design and typesetting by Joel GregoryTypeset in Adobe Caslon and CriterionCataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of CongressNightboat BooksNew Yorkwww.nightboat.org the clearest sea, where from on high, floating, I can see my outline flowing by. REINALDO ARENAS, OH SOLE MIO TR.

KELLY WASHBOURNE Mosquitoes in flight Tiny wings batting the air Eggs into egg cream KEVIN KILLIAN, MOSQUITOES for Jibreel Everything past this page is a fiction. All real parties and persons mentioned past this page did not act in the way they are described here. The reader will be informed when they can assume truth again. MADNESS THE SELECTED POEMS OF LUIS MONTES-TORRES (1976-2035) Edited by Javier de las Palmas & ngel de la Escoba NIGHTBOAT BOOKS New York

Luis Montes-Torres was like a knot in a muscle; Luis Montes-Torres was like a hole in fabric. Both seem to be true. An always-active, hardened node straining towards something that isnt thereor a little negative, an unwoven dot made by threads moving too far from each other or by some foreign object pushing its way through.

He was a boring fire. This is the first selection of his poems, published twenty years after his death in 2035. It was a question about immigrant environmentalisms, posed to us by a mentor and comrade of ours, that led us back to Montes-Torress poetry: do they work? Do they work? To ngel, this meant do they effect change in the world, do they reverberate? To Javier, this meant do they coalesce together, do they jell into anything like a philosophy? A prior research collaboration of ours on multilingual protest poetics brought Montes-Torres into our footnotes as a negative, one example among many of Cuban American poets writing exclusively in English. But we remembered later, on brainstorming how to wrap our heads around this question, the uneven breadth of Montes-Torress work, the gestures and confusions he seemed to set out for us, towards these issues and more. We knew that his work seemed to know something, something useful, though it was unclear what exactly. And so began our long, new relationship to a minor poet, one who briefly reached notoriety on being shortlisted for the National Book Award and on winning the Lambda Literary Award for his collection The Ocean as It Shouldnt Be, but who went almost entirely disregarded by the end of his life.

As we moved through what we could find of his work, we noticed a pattern. Each piece of Montes-Torress career that we encountered seemed disconnected from the others, each book uncomfortable with its place in his body of work, each critic of his only able to hold one book or one poem or one theme to analysis at a time. Our job, as we began to see it, was to be connective tissue. We decided, perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of faith that there was indeed something there, to take on the task of organizing what we could find, of making for Montes-Torres a document that would turn this scatter into a line. This book is the result. With a grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and with the guidance of Montes-Torress longtime partner, Evan Bower, we have been able to edit this selection of Montes-Torress poetry.

This book is arranged chronologically, selecting various poems from each of Montes-Torress published books, presented in the order they originally appeared in. As well, among his poems, we have tried to build something of a biography for this still under-known poet. In brief notes before each selection of poems, we detail the events of his life that led to the publication of each book, his interlocutors at the time, and some frameworks for thinking about the contributions and consequences of his life for Latino-American poetics in the early 21st century. His moves, his attachments, his fears, his moodsas much as these seem to thicken the meaning and context of his poetry, just as often these bits of his life deflate, confuse, or betray it. He was both frustratingly mild and dramatically reactive. He was a man of obsessions and anxiety, of interest and wonder.

He was as much enchanted as disenchanted. We wanted to be stuck with Montes-Torres, stuck in the same way he was stuck, and we invite the reader to follow us there. Javier de las Palmas & ngel de la Escoba, 2055

Luis Montes-Torres was born on June 28th of 1976 in Pinar del Ro, Cuba. On May 10th, 1980, at just four years old, he was taken by his father, Javier Montes, on a ship to Key West as part of the Mariel boatlift, leaving his mother, Pilar Torres, in Cuba. His father would later recount that on their ship they sat next to Mirta Ojito, eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Julio Gonzlez, eventual mass murderer. After a difficult sojourn in the Keys, Montes-Torres and his father took a series of buses from Florida to Fairfax, Virginia, where Montes-Torres grew up.

He attended English-language schools where his grades were poor and he had few friends, both due in large part to his initial difficulty with English. Even without much of a social circle through his education and adolescence, Montes-Torres was generally described by his family as a charming, energetic, and positive child. He collected insects, taught himself crochet, and watched movies to pass the time; he was boyish and handsome, though acne-prone and susceptible to chronic ear infections. After graduating from high school, he attended George Washington University for a single semester before dropping out in 1994. In a 2012 interview in BOMB, he cited a boredom [he] could not find the bottom of as the reason for his leaving the university so quickly. A generally poor relationship with his father, the fact that he had not had contact with his mother since 1980, and his lack of close friends left Montes-Torres with very little financial support during his first years out of college.

During that time, he worked for meager pay as a food prep assistant at a gallery in Washington, DC, where he became exposed to art and writing outside of school. In the same interview from 2012, Montes-Torres says of this time: There was so much I had to do to feel I had my feet on the ground anywhere in the world. I began a process of internal digging, hoping I would find an inner resource to replace the joy of outside things, which had started to dull. But I didnt find anything inside of me. Art in my life was a temporary answer to an important question: what do I now care for? Montes-Torres credits his first encounter with poetry as an adult to reading John Wienerss