Ford Over is cut up and aggregate and mashup: made of language drawn from the multilingual chronicles of explorers who traveled through the land now known as the state of Texas. At the heart of the book is the mystery of the physical act of crossing a river; perhaps the person crossing is Juan Luis (Jean Louis) Berlandier, a Franco-Mexican botanist who traveled through Northern Mexico drawing maps, writing and collecting plants as part of the 1826 Comisión de los Limites. Or perhaps it is someone else. Perhaps it is you. Or me. Or them. Or us still trapped in the crossing of that same river.
JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Their undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Writing with Caca by Luis Felipe Fabre (Green Lantern Press, 2021), and forthcoming Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023). JD's book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press, and in 2019 Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist book, The Unsettlements: Dad. From 2010-2020, they worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and from 2015-2020 with the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD edits chapbooks with Ugly Duckling Presse's Señal series, is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more.
"As with so many superb compilations of poetry, Ford Over lends itself to quick reading or to in-depth unpacking, as well as to as much rereading as the heart desires. It hardly ever speaks directly about the focus of its text, and is made all the better for it. It allows a reader who might otherwise be walled off by their own assumptions to experience something beyond borders." - John Venegas
"Texts become rivers whose currents flow across pages; words engage in their own pilgrimages across digital scans of maps; an anti-glossary disrupts a translation project by erasing the words of the dominant language to leave the alien language in its native state unknown. Spanish and English live within the same poems, often coexisting without translation or corollary. These poems destabilize the power dynamics bound up in the very essence of our language-selves, and through these undiscoveries Pluecker does 'teach [us] to ferry well.'" - Nathan Stabenfeldt
