Keywords: Nature, Life, Body, Death, Sacred, International Poetry.
WILD WEST
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Alejandro Castro
English-Spanish
Translated from the Spanish by Arthur Dixon
Foreword by Johan Gotera
2023
Hardcover | 180 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback | 180 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Your name is a landlocked country,
the highest peak of the poorest range / on earth.
The only glory in your name, Liberator,
is a street of clacking heels
size twelve.
- Alejandro Castro
In Wild West he explores unprotected civic space, the neglect produced by a state that has, dangerously, absented itself from the city. From this vantage point, he meditates on the destruction wrought by the breakup of social accords. The city, it seems, is dead; now, the periphery is all there is. Born of a nonrestorative disillusionment, the poetic voice takes shape as the dweller-in-evil who points out the love, the stench, and the noises of this urban horizon. Here we cross paths with the “aspiring murderer,” the neighbor who “lunges at his wife,” and the body waiting for its worms.
- Johan Gotera
ALEJANDRO CASTRO (Caracas, 1986). PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University. He has worked as an instructor at both the School of Arts and the School of Literature at the Central University of Venezuela. Since 2016, he has lived in the United States, where he has taught Spanish and Latin American culture courses at New York University. In 2019, he coedited the volume Radical Disobedience, a book on Venezuelan performance and politics, for HemiPress. He has authored various academic works covering multiple fields such as psychoanalysis and Venezuelan, Caribbean, and Brazilian studies. His research has received several awards, including the MacCracken Fellowship (2016), the Alpine Fellowship (2018), the NYU Migration Network Award (2021), and the Penfield Fellowship (2022).
As a poet, Alejandro Castro has authored the following books: Parasitarias (Libros del Fuego, 2020); El lejano oeste (bid&co, 2013), and No es por vicio ni por fornicio. Uranismo y otras parafilias (Monte Ávila, 2011). His nonfiction has been published in digital media outlets, newspapers, and journals.