Tejada, Roberto: Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness

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Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastnessby Roberto Tejada (Noemi Press, paperback)

Publication Date: March 15, 2019

Publisher Marketing: “STILL NOWHERE IN AN EMPTY VASTNESS is a collection of essays and manifestos engaging hemispheric desires and borderland eventualities in the geopolitical imagination of the Americas. The book enlivens a capacious Latinx poetics, spanning to include 16th- and 17th-century imperial accounts, 20th-century images of Mexico pictured by U.S. artists and writers, the neo-baroque pageantry of Jos Lezama Lima in post-Revolution Havana, as well as contemporary poets Reina Mara Rodriguez, from Cuba; Mexican fabulist Pablo Helguera; and Chicano multimedia wordsmith Harry Gamboa Jr., from Los Angeles. Explored also are many-sided masculinities, from conquistador castaway Cabeza de Vaca, stripped and disempowered in the New World; Lezama Lima’s ‘prison baroque’ of syntactically queer desire; George Oppen’s craftsmanship manhood; Jay Wright’s Yoruba and Toltec body-doubles, hidden figures of exile and self-foreignness; and the man-child constructed in the media spectacle of modern castaway Elin Gonzlez. These essays configure a poetics of the Americas, mirror-occasions for reflecting the fear and fantasies prompted by metaphors of occupation, displacement, and counter-conquest.”