Copy

“Without the copying process,” the poet Dolores Dorantes has said, “there would be no life, no reality.” Through deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, COPY is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration. This displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being–and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, COPY asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.

Poetry. Latinx Studies.