"of those assembled here / ... / this concerns whatever we / are saprotrophic / nuestras pieles / dicen casi todo / a glitch exceeding" begins Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz's vertebrae, a translingual poetic diptych written in the aftermath of explosive colonial contact, from within capitalism's cold twilight calculations. In polyrhyme, wisecrack, snarl, and epitaph, Sarmiento Cruz performs an "uncoupling ceremony," reminding us that "capital / will eventually / pass with or without us." Here is a vertiginous, locked-in collection that slips between tongues ("tragedia / come at me") like circuits in the machine, where a city "consuming fifty two cows daily" must meet visions of bison lining the horizon. Sarmiento Cruz reorients us to freefall and "the comfort of the postapocalyptic posibilidades": that something of us (human, animal, floral, fungal) will survive inside whatever comes next.
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz is a scholar, translator, and poet born in Mexico City and residing in Lexington, KY, on the occupied lands of the Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Osage people. Other creative writing and translations can be found in Fence, Chicago Review, and Action, Spectacle.
"Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz unveils a physics of language wherein minute clusters of utterances freely glide and collide with each other. A master choreographer of the fragment, Sarmiento Cruz delights us with a delirium of intimations on the uncanny relations between the natural and human-social worlds. A bold 'poetic voice' (without the show of a poetic voice) guides us through a lush, uninhibited curiosity about the cosmos itself. Marvelous! Profundamente divertido." — Rodrigo Toscano
"Poly-vocalic as in multi-worlded, washing between Spanish & English & playing with a kind of semiotic transference—across lines, between words, between worlds, in its very shape, here is a poem with an importantly, politically, irreverent relationship to bounded things. At any moment the directions can shift, and on the dime of Sarmiento Cruz's sharp wit: 'guess you expect / me to talk / about walls / why stand on their shoulders / when you can / lick their faces.' In these poems we have awe, presence, capital & empire, the extinctness of animals & the tactile sensations of our lived-in world, 'paréntesis del / antropoceno / la era glacial / de los teléfonos.'" — Cody-Rose Clevidence
"in the cosmic void of today, in this day's hope for tomorrow, even in the absences created by machines - Sarmiento Cruz seizes the moment - a time when the wild buffalo return to Mexico, as the eagle and the condor come together and as everything is different now, we fall into the magnetic spirals leading us to Abya Yala… with this book we inhabit the 'inclinación a deambular' 'nómadas como orquídeas' 'sin origin'… because no one is illegal on stolen land and these borders are not ours… and crazy horse loves us who resist the crimes of the day… 'as love in a time of fascism is latinamerican'… 'to pump / other / bloods / &bleed / othercolors / for new tongues'...." — Roberto Harrison
