Raquel Salas Rivera

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. WHILE THEY SLEEP (UNDER THE BED IS ANOTHER COUNTRY) refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María's aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child's nightmare. Written in English, WHILE THEY SLEEP points to an imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, UNDER THE BED is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico.

Under the Bed Is Another Country

While They Sleep

Poetry. Written in response to the PROMESA bill (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) bill, LO TERCIARIO/THE TERCIARY offers a decolonial queer critique and reconsideration of Marx. The book's titles come from Pedro Scaron's El Capital, the 1976 translation of Karl Marx's classic. Published by Siglo Veintiuno Editores, this translation was commonly used by the Puerto Rican left as part of political formation programs. LO TERCIARIO/THE TERCIARY places this text in relation to the Puerto Rican debt crisis, forcing readers to reconsider old questions when facing colonialism's newest horrors.

Lo terciario/ The Tertiary

Antes Que Isla Es Volcán / Before Island Is Volcano

Erica Mena

Ricardo Maldonado

Carina del Valle Schorske

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. In the months following Hurricane Maria's passage over Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican poets, translators, book artists, & editors Erica Mena, Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado & Carina Del Valle Schorske came together to curate poetry as a response to the disaster. This book is the result. Forty Puerto Rican poets presented bilingually, some for the first time, are collected here from across the island and the diaspora, and brought into conversation with one another in these pages.

Puerto Rico en mi corazn/ Puerto Rico in My Heart

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet's gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. For Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

Poemas Para la Nación

X/ex/exis

From the National Book Award-nominated, Lambda Award-winning poet: a powerful, inventive new collection that looks to the future of Puerto Rico with love, rage, beauty, and hope. Raquel Salas Rivera’s star has risen swiftly in the poetry world, and this, his 6th book, promises to cement his status as one of the most important poets working today. In sharp, crystalline verses, written in both Spanish and English versions, antes que isla es volcán daringly imagines a decolonial Puerto Rico. Salas Rivera unfurls series after series of poems that build in intensity: one that casts Puerto Rico as the island of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, another that imagines a multiverse of possibilities for Puerto Rico's fate, a 3rd in which the poet demands his right to a future and its immediate distribution. The verses are rigorous and sophisticated, engaging with literary and political theory, yet are also hard-hitting, charismatic, and quotable (“won’t you be sorry? / won’t you wish you had a boss? / won’t you get restless / with all that freedom?”). These poems tap unflinchingly into the explosive energy of the island, transforming it into protest, into spirit, into art.

Raquel Salas Rivera

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