She plays with language. She chews up those words and then smears them on the page with ink. She rolls those words around and pounds at them and bends them and puts dents in them and squeezes them, then packs them in hard then stretches them out until no elasticity is left then hurls them back at us sitting in the audience. She mixes them up, English with Spanish and something undecipherable but still sounding magnificent, and then she utters them with relish, with punctuation, with hiss and energy and coercion.
I'm sitting in Morrison Library in Doe on the Cal campus. I've forgotten completely that the great Robert Hass is nearby somewhere, almost tangible. I forget I am at a Lunch Poems event. I've been sucked into the words and music and poetry of Monica de la Torre. I am a listener, a Talk Shows participant, and a part of the unpublished manuscript that she is writing, a member of the daffy, crazy, topsy-turvy world she has inverted and subverted.
She says "saliva is not interchangealbe with ink." She transforms storyline into scenes into paragraphs into absence into loss. Narratives are invented, rewritten, erased. Language is twisted, substituted, melded, so that Si and Non are almost interchangeable but not but all singsong, lyrical.
She bends rules, bends lines (great poem!), changes planes of interiority and switches contexts w/o blinking. She takes people's responses to a question on a radio show and translates them. She takes another poet's Spanish, translates it into English, then finds the Spanish poet with similar lines and mixes them and retranslates them. She makes me wonder about language and believe in language. She forces me to think of the tranmutability of language as well as the limitations of language.
She stuns us all.
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