Description
Poetry. THE HAPPY END / ALL WELCOME is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants... At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.
Author Bio
Mónica de la Torre is the author of four previous poetry collections—two in Spanish and two in English, and several chapbooks, including The Happy End (The Song Cave). A native of Mexico City, she has translated Latin American poets and co–edited several multilingual anthologies, most notably Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon). Her work has been published in magazines such as Aufgabe, Convolution, frieze, and The New Yorker, as well as anthologies and exhibit catalogs including Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship, Corrected Slogans (Triple Canopy), and The Animated Reader (The New Museum). She was the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency in 2014. She teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Columbia University and is BOMB Magazine's senior editor.
Author City: Brooklyn, NY USA