From Ayé Aton’s portfolio Afrika in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review. Courtesy of MARCH and the Estate of Ayé Aton. Photograph by Cary Whittier.

Augusto Monterroso’s The Gold Seekers is a fun mix of personal archaeology and literary autobiography in an erudite yet concise package. I love a short book full of rabbit holes for me to follow long after I’m finished, I love reading in translation, and I love prose that doesn’t conform to any particular genre. The Gold Seekers fits the bill. On the surface, it’s a memoir of the Guatemalan writer’s bohemian childhood through the twenties into the thirties. But the narrative of Monterroso’s early life occasionally strays into his later years or departs entirely from his material existence to ruminate on literature, film, Central American history, obscure Italian poets, and much more. The memoir, with its detours and vignettes, reads like a book of experimental essays, the unifying subject matter being Monterroso’s excavation of the people and events that helped him form an early idea of himself, an idea inherently tied to taste—how he relates to his world through his developing sensibilities and ethics. The sections on Central American history contextualize Monterroso’s later self-theorization as an “ignored” writer whose political exile in Mexico from his adopted Guatemala rendered him a “citizen of nowhere,” seemingly unnoticed by the wider literary establishment despite the fact that he became a favorite of writers like Calvino for his imaginative yet succinct short stories. Monterroso’s memoir is also characteristically slim; the turns of his capacious mind are rendered from Spanish into lyrical English by the translator Jessica Sequeira, and the whole book, including a foreword by Enrique Vila-Matas and a translator’s note by Sequeira, totals under a hundred and fifty pages. 

Read More

Otis Houston Jr., Untitled Cellphone Photograph (2022), from issue no. 240 of The Paris Review. Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York.

I love density. Compression is nuclear. Big family, small house—no room (Jeezy). Used to act up when I went to school—thought it was cool, but I really was hurt (Meek Mill). Free Gaza, we on the corner like Israelites (Earl Sweatshirt). It’s opaque / and then it is violent (Ibrahim, “Wittgenstein Tried to Warn Us About Lions”). Poetry is a drama of gaps and leaps but also of gather and charge. One can’t be too precious about it.

BLK WTTGNSN, Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim’s forthcoming collection from Tiger Bark Press, is density itself, a kind of reconstructed surrealist epic of black critique that overwhelms with its range and slices with its imagination. Ibrahim’s work has refreshingly little to do with the platitudinous, overly carved (to use my friend S.’s phrase) contemporary poem that sometimes goes viral when bad things happen and people want to confirm their confusion or mystify their position. This book is bold, serious, and so funny, even when it flows like blood and smoke.

Read More