Event Type
To be is to sing the aesthetic poison of colonial historicity. For poets whose families and histories emerge from the lands sometimes called Mesoamerica, there is always a question of relation and separation. How to relate to the archives of Mesoamerica from which so many have been forcibly separated and alienated? How to bring the archives of the archaic into contemporary poetics? And, furthermore, how to do so by reckoning with (and not ignoring) the colonial systems by which such histories find their way into our hands? In this panel we will nucleate this conversation around five poets whose recent books, in their own ways, seek to think with the aesthetic forms of hard histories and their complex contemporary reception: Steven Alvarez’s Tonalamatl (Calamari Archive, 2024) ; Paul Martinez-Pompa’s Domestic Corpse (Match Factory Editions, 2025); Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s Black Box Syndrome (Omnidawn, 2023); Geronimo Sarmiento Cruz’s whalefall (Rescue Press, 2026); and Edgar Garcia’s Cantares (Wesleyan UP, 2026). Focusing our conversation will be the idea of song—cantar—as a nexus of voice, loss, breath, life, risk, and recursive articulation.