Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors include being named the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and receiving the New Voices Award from Puerto Rico's Festival de la Palabra. He is the author of 5 previous full-length poetry books. His 3rd book, lo terciario/the tertiary, won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award. His 4th book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was longlisted for the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award and was a finalist for CLMP's 2020 Firecracker Award. His 5th book, x/ex/exis, won the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. He currently writes and teaches in Puerto Rico.
”Salas Rivera, a Lambda Award–winning author of five previous books
of poetry, wields wicked intelligence and blades of humor to crack
open the minds of his readers . . . Punchy, funny, smart, and
stylistically unmatched, this bilingual edition also allows readers
to scour the poet’s self-translation for insights to his creative
process.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“With antes que isla es volcán / before island is volcano,
Salas Rivera has taken the planted seeds of rebellion and created a
beautiful, mature ceiba tree of poetry ready to bear up the island
on its expanding branches and show readers how to unleash their
imaginations from the chains of colonization.”
—Washington Review of Books
“To dream other worlds in the face of colonial apocalypse . . .
This imagining is what the poems—the poem—that are before island is
volcano generously and powerfully offer us. Since the tertiary, one
of the most important books of our time, Raquel Salas Rivera has
been documenting—with acuity, and clarity, and beauty—the colonial
hole, creating life-giving books, in multiple languages, and
channeling multiple universes, to gift us the words we need as we
ward off the nations they send to kill us.”
—Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award–winning author of The
Performance of Becoming Human
“Raquel Salas Rivera proposes that ‘going back’ is a political and
poetic act, a trip back to magma, to memory and to the words that
attest to our struggle against the colonial yokes that keep trying
to ensnare us. For this reason, antes que isla es volcán/before
island is volcano looks beyond each verse and beyond the pages of
this book. It invites us to look to our own poetics and convictions
as a jumping-off point for redefining the geopolitics of
possibility.”
—Mayra Santos-Febres, author of La amante de Gardel
“We are an archipelago built with borrowed words, plagued by the
myths and archetypes of the always insipid but effective
Eurocentrism. The temptation to baptize our misery as mythological
is masterfully answered by Raquel Salas Rivera, whose poetic makes
use of all those voices, our voices, sometimes epic, playful,
scathing or rendered simple beauty or just the good argument of an
honest intelligence and the steadfast forcefulness of the
politically just.”
—Luis Negrón, author of Mundo Cruel
“While everyday language seems to be a string of dispossessions and
exclusions, with unnamed pending causes, here the words spoken
between people are almost international treaties: subjects placed
somewhere so they can say what they say and much more. . . . Almost
nothing belongs to us, but imagination is always ours. We are
insularly sufficient. Although at times it inhabits islands like
ruins, Raquel’s poetry is always a projection towards luminous
possibility, generous with himself and others.”
—Yolanda Segura, author of serie de circunstancias posibles en
torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora
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