The Dirty Text

Poetry. Fiction. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott. Includes a translator's notes by Olivia Lott and an afterword by Kristin Dykstra. Written in the 1990s in Cuba, THE DIRTY TEXT is a book of poems, a book of stories and, most vividly, a book of dreams. As poet Rosa Alcalá writes, Ríos' writings are "indescribable manifestations of a poetics unfastened to mode, genre, or category." In this book, human eyes appear beneath other human eyes, snakes materialize with three heads, and the bodies of loved ones duplicate, disintegrate or speak to ghosts and Gods. It is a book about the possibilities of language and literature to articulate our relationship to the communities we occupy and the communities we imagine, a book that disentangles the lines between our conscious lives and our unconscious lives, what we imagine and what we experience. Ríos writes of the island's east and west cities of Havana and Santiago, but she looks off the island as well, to Mexico, to South America, to Europe, at once evoking and defying the broader, international traditions of surrealist and hallucinatory writing.