Description
A multilingual Spanish and English book by the Chilian writer Carlos Soto Román.
Carlos Soto-Román NATURE OF OBJECTS is a collection of three books gathered into one volume. The first section “Pierrot le Fou”, written in Spanish, is a long concrete poem. Pierrot le Fou has been used as a score for audiovisual performances by Soto-Román. The second book is an English-language recreation of the Spanish text. The third section NATURE OF OBJECTS is a collection of minimal poems that is a “Love poem in the face of catastrophe” as Rachel Levitsky has described it.
Poetry.
"Try to seize / the means / of production" states Carlos Soto-Román, mid-way through one of the two long poems that make up NATURE OF OBJECTS. Both pieces achieve the extraordinarily difficult task of writing--powerfully, delicately, and without-cliche--about the point at which (good) poetry meets (bad) politics. In Pierrot le Fou the gradual unfolding of meaning enacts the process of revelation and resistance and as such engages the reader in its process and message as opposed to beating them over the head with it. NATURE OF OBJECTS is (in part) a meditation upon control and creative freedom. Soto-Román does not "seize" the world so much as he embraces it, creating a political poetry that reaches for your hand instead of going for the throat. It is work of huge clarity, generosity, and compassion. As such, it is some of the most powerful and important poetry that is currently being written.” – Tim Atkins
”In NATURE OF OBJECTS, Carlos Soto-Román proposes and exacts two feats. First, the poet enters the lacunae of the unspeakable and wreaks language out from the mere fact of letters - as if Mallarmé and M. NourbeSe Philip collided on the screen of a tender and enabling pillow of artificial intelligence. Then, while resting on our tender pillow, we are reminded that “The eye is/just a prank”, an organ, like all human and AI organs, one that registers too quickly. CSR insists on slowing it all down and makes the impossible - love poetry in the face of catastrophe - not just a necessity, but a possibility.” – Rachel Levistky
Author Bio
Carlos Soto-Román (Valparaíso, 1977) is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds a M.A. in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective and obtained an artist's residency at the MacDowell Colony. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks, and festivals in Chile, the US, and Europe. In the United States, he has published Philadelphia's Notebooks (Otoliths), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press, 2014), Bluff (Commune Editions), and Common Sense (Make Now Press, 2019). In the UK he has published Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press, 2019), and in Chile he has published La Marcha de los Quiltros, Haikú Minero, Cambio y Fuera, 11, Densidad (d=m/V) and Antuco in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra. He translated the first Spanish-language version of Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff. Carlos curated the anthology of US poetry Elective Affinities. His book 11 was awarded the 2018 Municipal Poetry Prize in Santiago, Chile.
Author City: SANTIAGO CHL