I suppose the main thing I want to say is this: I wish Salas Rivera had gone further and leant into his ideas more. The very first poem in the collection (titled “notas sobre las temporadas/notes on the seasons”) opens with the line “en el español no nos damos naturalmente. / in spanish, we don’t naturally occur.” It uses the absence of the letter X in the Spanish language as a way of commenting on the exclusion of nonbinary people not only in gendered languages but also in society and culture more broadly. It’s a pretty basic observation but it’s a good starting point. Then the poem abruptly pivots to talking about lions transforming into snakes? The concept gets lost.

The only poem which really stood out for me was “(fenomenología)/(phenomenology).” Other than that, they all kind of blended together, and they just didn’t land for me outside a few interesting turns of phrase here and there. I think I might have enjoyed the book more were my Spanish not so rusty – the Spanish versions of the poems seemed to flow much better than the English ones.