A part of the Akrilica Series at Noemi Press. Akrilica, a co-publishing venture between Noemi Press and Letras Latinas — the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame — showcases innovative Latino writing. The series name recalls the groundbreaking, bilingual book from the eighties by distinguished Chicano writer, and United States Poet Laureate Emeritus, Juan Felipe Herrera. You Da One explores Internet culture, how it creates and how it dismantles the self as a body. In this second edition, Tamayo expands their original collection in a conversation about the pervasive and personal nature of rape culture.
Jennif(f)er Tamayo (they/them) is a poet, performer and essayist whose works reimagine the narratives about and politics of undocumented figures in the contemporary U.S. In their books, performances, and digital media, the "illegal" immigrant is recast as a punk figure that queers the norms of personhood and citizenship. They are the author of the hybrid poetry collections [Red Missed Aches, Read Mistakes] selected by Cathy Park Hong for the Gatewood Prize and YOU DA ONE (Noemi Books). Their latest chapbook, to kill the future in the present (Green Lantern Press) blends lyric forms and critical theory to explore how conditions of displacement and incarceration shared by Black, Indigenous and undocumented communities are sites for collective struggle. JT's writing is widely published and has been anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, New Latin@ Writing, and HarperCollins. JT has received fellowships from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Hemispheric Institute's EmergeNYC, CantoMundo, and the University of California Berkeley's Arts Research Center. They have staged performances at The Brooklyn Museum, BAMPFA, Midtown Arts & Theatre Center Houston, and La Mama Theatre.
They are a formerly undocumented, uninvited visitor born on Muisca territory (Bogota, Colombia) currently living on Sapponi territory.
"The landscape of Jennifer Tamayo's debut collection, YOU DA ONE, is spellbinding, mirroring the aesthetics of the Internet with its inclusion of spam and graphics. Tamayo cuts through the chaos in order to reveal a narrative about the speaker's experiences and thoughts on the body. YOU DA ONE explores the ways in which the Internet creates and/or diminishes the body and other bodies that surround the self: 'there is no WE here/there is barely an I.' appears several times throughout the collection, first in 'There is a chemistry I want to know about like how you are mine in mine'." - Simone Savannah
"By turns violent, political, romantic, incestual, cerebral, bodily, and personal, this second full-length from Tamayo (Red Missed Aches) bears the formal markings of the hypermodern in its deployment of digital, pop, and intertextual elements." - Anonymous
"Jennifer Tamayo's playful, personal, and disturbingly sincere You Da One (2014) quickly pulls the reader into its disobedient clutches. Vacillating between moments of explosive volume and more subdued, heartfelt sentiment, You Da One introduces a speaker who wades through the language of modern technological excess on her journey to meet her father for the first time in her native Colombia. Its narrative is also made up of linguistic play that portrays an engagement with the internet and its effect on how we produce language and articulate our multiple identities—its clutter and chaos contaminating the pages just as it contaminates our daily lives. In an early section, email correspondence between the speaker and her family (replete with lingo, typos, and lax grammar) appears between repeated internet ads such as, 'FIND SINCERE JEWISH SINGELS IN YOUR AREA.' These ads dominate the page, distracting from the emotionally genuine and comparatively minute email messages. Still, despite being formally overwhelmed, the emails retain their powerful resonance." - Ronnie Peltier
