Intervenir/Intervene

In this trenchant and invigorating work, Donates and Sánchez re-envision the process of collaboration, turning it from a simple unifying act into an examination of transactions of power, including those between poet, poet, and translator, as well as those tensions between a person and the circumstances that inscribe one's life. The poems arise from the premise that "The world never/ closed to you. The world// COLLABORATES." In this situation, an autonomous voice is not possible, as there is no insulated self. With Sánchez writing from Mexico City and Donates from Los Angeles, where she has political asylum, the book is steeped in the conditions of its making. The language of violence, estrangement, and disappearance volleys throughout the text in fragmented refrains; the force of one utterance disrupts and changes the course of the last, such that a poem begins from its own destruction and continues by way of perpetual interruption. Dorantes and Sánchez's book is genuinely hopeful, not by dint of what the poems express, but because the writing forges a way to speak when one is always already spoken for by forces to which one has not given assent. This enthralling bilingual edition reveals a new poetics of resistance. (Aug.)