Spring Tlaloc Séance

Author: José-Luis Moctezuma 

Publisher: Projective Industries (2016)

Edition of 120

"A séance is a meeting at which people attempt to make contact with the dead, to receive or relay messages from spirits, and in this book the poet and his words are the vehicle, the body, through which these messages get relayed. And like any good séance, this one speaks in many tongues, a multilingual concoction of gringo talk, Spanish, ‘indiomas,’ German, mathematics, and outer space. The ghosts are drinking ‘pulque backwash’ at this séance (pulque, I gather, from both the traditional hole-in-the-wall pulquerias as well as the fancy yuppy mango and papaya-infused pulquerias you find in upper crust Mexico City or Brooklyn). At this séance hipsters and ‘avian-beings’ are choking on the strange sounds that gurgle in this fusion of contemporary cultural politics and ancient Meso-American tradition. ‘We’re othered in othering,’ writes Moctezuma, and in this book the othering takes the form of a hybrid, border-crossing cosmic body ‘inflated by wrath and poverty and angelic sweat.’ Here, ‘the pornography of human minutiae’ is a system of transhistorical mythology combined with a radical poetic history where the early Americas (the colonial and the indigenous) fuse with the modern day Americans, the Ming Dynasty and the Ottoman empire to create a perverted, multi-headed beast. I don’t know of another poet ‘borderzoning’ quite like Moctezuma, whose Spring Tlaloc Séance expands the possibilities of what can be contained in unitedstatesian poetics. I am excited for what he’ll do next.”

— Daniel Borzutzky