Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico (Camino del Sol) - Softcover

Noel, Urayoán

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816531684 ISBN 13: 9780816531684

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2015

Synopsis

Is poetry an alternative to or an extension of a globalized language? In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico, poet Urayoán Noel maps the spaces between and across languages, cities, and bodies, creating a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological.

In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and São Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel’s bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences.

A number of the poems and self-translations here were composed on a smartphone, or else de- and re-composed with a variety of smartphone apps and tools, in an effort to investigate the promise and pitfalls of digital vernaculars. Noel’s poetics of performative self-translation operates not only across languages and cultures but also across forms: from the décima and the “staircase sonnet” to the collage, the abecedarian poem, and the performance poem.

In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.

About this title

About the Author

Urayoán Noel is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam and several books of poetry in English and Spanish, the most recent of which is EnUncIAdOr. He has been a fellow of CantoMundo and the Ford Foundation, and he is currently the poetry editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and is an assistant professor of English and Spanish at New York University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816531684
• ISBN 13: 9780816531684
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 120