Madness

I put a pencil
on the river
and draw it a source

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s Madness bends our perception of reality with its clever and well-executed conceit. Purportedly published some 30 odd years in the future, the book opens by introducing us to Javier de las Palmas and Ángel de la Escoba, two fictional scholars working on “immigrant environmentalisms” and “multilingual protest poetics,” who have curated “The Selected Poems of Luis Montes-Torres (1976–2035),” a Cuban-American “minor poet,” also fictional. Through often poetic editors’ notes that open each of Montes-Torres’s eight collections, we learn that the poet, described as being “like a knot in a muscle […] like a hole in fabric,” has suffered numerous mental breakdowns and the interplay between biography and creative output is an important undercurrent in the work.

Madness avoids many pitfalls that its ambitious opening led me to anticipate. I feared the captivating narrative setup would eclipse the work itself. Instead, I was struck by poems that unleash melancholy in short, staccato lines, like this excerpt from “Motion”:

I said the boat is lonely
not me
it is tempting
to put a towel down
and stare
at the difference

We observe Montes-Torres evolving his craft over the course of his career, reworking his approach to themes such as the passage of time and the environment. In “Method of Loci” (from Some Shields, published by Half-life Books in 2032), “every year is drawn together / like the bends in a paper fan.” Such “later” poems continue to play with gaps in syntax and make associative leaps in longer lines. Images resurface in surprising ways, as with “In My Best Attire,” which begins: “a white truck turned over on a highway / a brilliant black stain,” and closes by asserting that “everyone would like to be a tuxedo.” 

Under the guise of reclaiming an imaginary, unsung poet, Ojeda-Sagué moves between biographical notes and poetry in a thoughtfully orchestrated contrapuntal exploration of mental health and its effects on human creativity. The character of Montes-Torres feels real, yet the curtain pulls back slightly in the final poem, “Tropical Negative”:

[…] you
treat me as your ghostwriter.
I click my heels
against a hemisphere.