Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico

By Urayoán Noel

Book Overview

Is poetry an alternative to or an extension of a globalized language? In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisf rico, poet Urayo n Noel maps the spaces between and across languages, cities, and bodies, creating a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological.

In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and S o Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel's bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences.

A number of the poems and self-translations here were composed on a smartphone, or else de- and re-composed with a variety of smartphone apps and tools, in an effort to investigate the promise and pitfalls of digital vernaculars. Noel's poetics of performative self-translation operates not only across languages and cultures but also across forms: from the d cima and the "staircase sonnet" to the collage, the abecedarian poem, and the performance poem.

In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisf rico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816531684
• ISBN13: 9780816531684
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"