Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisf駻ico (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816531684)

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.

Author: Urayo疣 Noel
ISBN-10: 0816531684
ISBN-13: 9780816531684
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Language: English
Published: 09/24/2015
Pages: 120
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 09/15/2015 pg. 17
Library Journal 11/15/2015 pg. 90