Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Urayoán Noel's plurilingual, polyphonic, & polymorphous text works are images are performance scores are records of poetry actions are homophonic translations are poems are homages to some of Latin America and the Caribbean's greatest innovators. Their language is a haunted one. Throughout Noel's body of work the ghost of Spanish unsettles the English language, disrupting its expansionist ambitions. Ditto for the specter of English in the Spanish lines. The only expansionism here pertains to the field of poetry, and we're all the luckier for it"—Mónica de la Torre.
Author City: ALBANY, NY USA
Urayoán Noel is the author of the book HI-DENSITY POLITICS (BlazeVOX Books, 2010) and the book/DVD KOOL LOGIC/LA LOGICA KOOL (Bilingual Press, 2005), as well as two collections of poetry in Spanish: Las flores del mall (object-book, 2000) and Boringkén (Ediciones Callejón/LaTertulia, 2008). A contributing editor of Mandorla, he is the translator of the chapbook Belleza y Felicidad (Belladonna*, 2005), and has translated a variety of Latin American and U.S. Latino/a poets. His reviews and essays have appeared in Contemporary Literature, BOMB, and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and he has performed internationally, both solo and as part of Spanic Attack. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Noel divides his time between the South Bronx and upstate New York. He teaches English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he serves as a faculty advisor to the online poetics journal Barzakh.
Reviews and Other Links
author site
Rigoberto González's Small Press Highlights for 2010 @ National Book Critics Circle blog
Sueyeun Juliette Lee @ The Constant Critic
“In HI-DENSITY POLITICS, Urayoán Noel celebrates the ‘composite of elsewheres’ that make us whole. Allowing the shift of language its living immersion through the electric barrio, this book tunes into the many frequencies that ‘re-site the body’ as observed by the ‘mock-spañol’ sapien, the layered strata rife with invention. Let’s move, these pages say, let’s breathe the city through our body. With episodic density, Noel whirls us through an extravagant journey, proposing a newly charged coda for closeness.”
—Edwin Torres
“In HI-DENSITY POLITICS, Urayoán Noel hurls himself out of himself towards what actually ‘happens’ in the world—deep ideological dalliance with A = not-A’s, B’s = C’s. As mediator ‘between cultures,’ mashing up newly found ‘passions’ to cultural funk-outs, he is ever the exacerbationist (trozos de ‘intención’—micro choques en colliders de jour). But not just for himself (!) Go-ahead here is by community (dímelo)—a solid push back on repressive hegemonies. The puckish poetic reminds one of Brecht’s Die Hauspostille (Manual of Piety). The we-could-pull-the-plug-on-all-this-culture-art-stuff-at-any-time—has been ghoulish kin to cultural-political artists since then. Thus, this book is also a ‘teaching’ of our un-teachable busted capitalist moment. And marvelously, we feel freedom-potential in HI-DENSITY POLITICS. Noel rattles the ‘big other’ symbolic order just long enough for the signs to slink out from under it, unbridled, furiously cute, in maximalist rhythms.”
—Rodrigo Toscano