Madness

Madness is a book of poems that works as the selected poems of an invented poet, Luis Montes-Torres. He is a gay Cuban exile who makes a modest name for himself in the poetry world, until the shape of his ordinary life becomes overwhelming, stilted and impossible. The book is set in a speculative present and alternates between the poems and editorial commentary on them. Together they ask how language stretches across a whole life. The story that emerges is one of unpredictable swings between anxiety and attachment, and between the political and the personal, such as comes with any American life marked by difference. Gabriel Ojeda-Sague treats the book as a study of how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love and fantasy get written into the forms we use for living.