antes que isla es volcán: poemas / before island is volcano: poems

Author: Raquel Salas Rivera

Publisher: Beacon Press (2022)

Raquel Salas Rivera’s star has risen swiftly in the poetry world, and this, his sixth book, promises to cement his status as one of the most important poets working today. In sharp, crystalline verses, written in both Spanish and English versions, antes que isla es volcándaringly imagines a decolonial Puerto Rico.

Salas Rivera unfurls series after series of poems that build in intensity: one that casts Puerto Rico as the island of Caliban in Shakespeare’s "The Tempest", another that imagines a multiverse of possibilities for Puerto Rico’s fate, a third in which the poet demands his right to a future and its immediate distribution. The verses are rigorous and sophisticated, engaging with literary and political theory, yet are also hard-hitting, charismatic, and quotable (“won’t you be sorry? / won’t you wish you had a boss? / won’t you get restless / with all that freedom?”).

These poems tap unflinchingly into the explosive energy of the island, transforming it into protest, into spirit, into art.

“To dream other worlds in the face of colonial apocalypse . . . This imagining is what the poems—the poem—that are before island is volcano generously and powerfully offer us. Since the tertiary, one of the most important books of our time, Raquel Salas Rivera has been documenting—with acuity, and clarity, and beauty—the colonial hole, creating life-giving books, in multiple languages, and channeling multiple universes, to gift us the words we need as we ward off the nations they send to kill us.”

–Daniel Borzutzky

“Raquel Salas Rivera proposes that ‘going back’ is a political and poetic act, a trip back to magma, to memory and to the words that attest to our struggle against the colonial yokes that keep trying to ensnare us. For this reason, antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano looks beyond each verse and beyond the pages of this book. It invites us to look to our own poetics and convictions as a jumping-off point for redefining the geopolitics of possibility.”

–Mayra Santos-Febres

“We are an archipelago built with borrowed words, plagued by the myths and archetypes of the always insipid but effective Eurocentrism. The temptation to baptize our misery as mythological is masterfully answered by Raquel Salas Rivera, whose poetic makes use of all those voices, our voices, sometimes epic, playful, scathing or rendered simple beauty or just the good argument of an honest intelligence and the steadfast forcefulness of the politically just.”

–Luis Negrón

“While everyday language seems to be a string of dispossessions and exclusions, with unnamed pending causes, here the words spoken between people are almost international treaties: subjects placed somewhere so they can say what they say and much more. . . . Almost nothing belongs to us, but imagination is always ours. We are insularly sufficient. Although at times it inhabits islands like ruins, Raquel’s poetry is always a projection towards luminous possibility, generous with himself and others.”

–Yolanda Segura