The University of Arizona Press
March 22, 2021
Celebrated poet Urayoán Noel read from his new poetry collection, Transversal, joined by Camino del Sol series editor Rigoberto González in an online event on Wednesday, March 17.
Transversal is part of the critically acclaimed Camino del Sol series, a literary series published by the University of Arizona Press to spotlight poetry, fiction, and essays from both emerging and established voices in Latinx literature.
Noel’s reading took the whole pandemic-era online-reading to a new level. He was powerful, head-spinning, and took the audience on a rollercoaster of translation, politics, and poetics.
Transversal, Urayoán Noel’s newest poetry collection, seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.
