Undocumentaries

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "If poetic episodes can act as gauges of social role-playing and role-disruption, what might lie 'outside' the roles 'we' 'inhabit?' What remains undocumented, but hardly silent? What are the sensed and projected traces of 'identity' that are ideologically eviscerated, and minimally verifiable? Rosa Alcala calls up a most magical theater when exploring these quandaries. The tipping (flash) points she constructs continuously build up toward the (touched, handled, engaged) experiential moment, all the while resisting an object-status art. This is a poetics that's prologue + epilogue to incidence, and never the 'it' itself. Sweet tin on tawny brass, flesh-toned, radio-worthy"--Rodrigo Toscano.

Rosa Alcala is the author of two chapbooks, Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna, 2003) and Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008). Her work appears in the anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007), and in journals such as Mandorla, CHAIN, Barrow Street, Tarpaulin Sky, and The Brooklyn Rail. Alcala has also translated poetry by Cecilia Vicuna, Lourdes Vazquez, and Lila Zemborain, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, she currently resides in El Paso, Texas, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. UNDOCUMENTARIES (Shearsman Books, 2010) is Rosa Alcala's first full-length collection of poetry.