shane_marble's review against another edition
4.0
There's a poem in this collection I'm fairly obsessed with called Salsa Capitalism. The first stanza:
Friends say, write a poem for J-Lo
and it's career suicide, kamikaze
loco. So - this one is for her, my J-Lo.
I think it condenses a lot of the things that make his work interesting and fun - campy and gossipy, embedded in a social world ('friends say'), attentive to gender, capital, and race, disdainful of poetry as institution, a proud gay Latino sensibility. This is less abrasive than a lot of poetry I love but there's definitely a fierce hostility to the way things are lingering in the background. Arroyo writes, "I've been naked with lovers and how mysterious they still remain." There's a constant excitement in his poetry about this mystery, one of my favourite things in the world.
Friends say, write a poem for J-Lo
and it's career suicide, kamikaze
loco. So - this one is for her, my J-Lo.
I think it condenses a lot of the things that make his work interesting and fun - campy and gossipy, embedded in a social world ('friends say'), attentive to gender, capital, and race, disdainful of poetry as institution, a proud gay Latino sensibility. This is less abrasive than a lot of poetry I love but there's definitely a fierce hostility to the way things are lingering in the background. Arroyo writes, "I've been naked with lovers and how mysterious they still remain." There's a constant excitement in his poetry about this mystery, one of my favourite things in the world.
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