ISBN : 9781643621173
Nightboat Books (March 15, 2022)
152 pages, $17.95, Paper
Reviewed by John Bradley
“Everything past this page is a fiction” the reader is warned before reading a single poem in this book. It’s a fitting notice. Madness, the subtitle tells us, consists of The Selected Poems of Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035). That is not a typo—Montes-Torres died in 2035 from brain cancer. In the spirit of Ferdinand Pessoa, the famous Portuguese fabulator of personas that he called heteronyms, Ojeda-Sagué gives us not only the poetry from various collections by Montes-Torres, but also brief essays on the life and struggles of this gay poet who left Cuba with his father for the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift. These short essays, written twenty years after Montes-Torres’ death, are composed by two more heteronyms: Javier de las Palmas and Ángel de la Escoba. And what’s most amazing about Madness is that this “fiction” of a book overflows with authenticity.
How can a work by several heteronyms feel authentic? One of the ways Ojeda-Sagué achieves
this is by maintaining a certain distance from the persona of Montes-Torres. For example, we are told in the introduction that Montes-Torres is “a minor poet,” something you don’t expect to see applied to any contemporary poet. This distance extends into the poetry, where we find a book title (Montes-Torres’s first publication) that’s a pun on the English translation of Montes-Torres’ name: “Hills and Towers.” Something a young, insecure poet might do.
Authenticity is further established with accounts of accidents and mistakes. For example, we learn “In 2037, a box containing seventy-five copies [of Hills and Towers] was discovered in a distributor’s warehouse in Illinois, unopened and untouched until then.” This means that only seventy-five copies of the book were ever distributed. Again, all too possible. An example of a personal mistake by Montes-Torres is even more telling. Asked by a publisher for a collection of poems, Montes-Torres says he has one and it will be ready in a month. He lies. The resulting rushed manuscript is so bad that our two editors refuse to reprint any poems from it. Instead, they present excerpts from his diaries composed at this point: “Richard Blanco and I had coffee today. Haha. He is very nice to look at. Bad poet though.” It’s hard to know if that “Haha” indicates that the meeting with Blanco was imaginary or not. But the slam at the end seems exactly what a poet who envies the recognition of another poet might say.
The poems from the various collections—from seven books, his diaries, and his last poems—feel consistent in voice and character, despite the varied forms. The most tender and intimate poems come from All the Love Bush (Pinned Flowers Press, 2002), a collection of love poems. The ending of “Spending” demonstrates this tenderness well:
Two hips joined
together is safe. I let my attention
be liquid when my head is resting
on your chest hair, the only time that
being physically real, being findable
by logic, doesn’t scare me. So, we’ll sew
an hour into another, admit
no one we know really is dying, just to
make the afternoon yawn, fizzle, spread, or spring.
Especially with the physicality of these love poems, Montes-Torres feels, as he puts it, most “physically real.” Yet this “realness” carries throughout the book, driven by the poetry but more so by the short essays relating the poet’s personal struggles. For example, his accident while walking six golden retrievers pushes tragedy into madness, with Montes-Torres taunting passersby and ending up being dragged across a street by the six dogs, all tied to his waist. As in a novel, we wonder how the central character could have come to this.
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué has created something unique with Madness, giving us not only poetry but an individual’s life, with all its messy details, through the skilled use of artifice. In doing so, Ojeda-Sagué leaves us with a paradoxical question: The greater the artifice, the greater the sense of authenticity? Or is he suggesting that this path leads to madness?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 5.
John Bradley’s most recent book of poetry is Everything in Motion, Everything at Rest, from Dos Madres Press. He is the recipient of two NEA Fellowships in Poetry. His reviews of poetry books have appeared in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rain Taxi, and Sulfur Surrealist Jungle.
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and doctoral candidate, originally from Miami, FL. As a poet, he is most recently the author of Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022). His academic research interests focus on gay men’s media cultures and the aesthetics of gay pornography. His dissertation in progress is titled “The Gender of Gay Men” and it investigates how gay male sexuality has provoked a variety of gendered positions, identifications, and allegiances in the 20th and 21st centuries.
See all items about John Bradley
Visit John Bradley’s contributors page.
See all items about Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
Visit Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s contributors page.
