A few years back, I reviewed the poetry collection Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué for Terrain.org. The collection was later a finalist of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, which didn’t surprise me at all, because the work was outstanding. It was so outstanding, in fact, that when I learned about Gabriel’s new collection with Nightboat Books, Madness, I was excited to read it and curious where the poet would go after Losing Miami.
Where Gabriel went was a faux-collected works format, a book that created a fictional poet (Luis Montes-Torres) and attributed the real poet’s work to the fictional one. Each section represents a fictional collection of Montes-Torres’s and a preface by the fictional editors provides a biography. It’s a poetry collection in a fictional frame. Totally brilliant.
The poems themselves present the same accessible insight as those in Losing Miami, often focused on themes of ecological change and queer identity explored in the previous work, but in new, fresh ways.
I ended up reviewing Madness for Rain Taxi Review of books. The review is in the print edition, which you can get here. It’s only 5 dollars and there’s lots of other great content and leads to new reads. You should pick up a copy of Madness and then read my review and let me know what you think!
Eric James Aldrich 