Keynote
A bilingual selection of tender, transgressive poems by a Peruvian poet and multimedia artist
Book Title
The Hormone of Darkness
Subtitle
A Playlist
Cover Image
- “Many of Otta’s poems are themselves highly musical, and—ably remixed in Matuk’s hands—they make frequent use of rhyme and repetition to produce a trancelike effect. Finally, this is poetry of the singular becoming a multiplicity, of boundaries blurred through coalescing sound and touch.”—Sean McCoy, The Believer
Poem Excerpt
We can go on like that forever
building paradise from our urges
out of our fetishes our loves our vices
How lucky
We’ll wait for you then
Don’t be too long
Bookmark the page
We’ll be Here
—From “The New Heaven”
building paradise from our urges
out of our fetishes our loves our vices
How lucky
We’ll wait for you then
Don’t be too long
Bookmark the page
We’ll be Here
—From “The New Heaven”
Body
In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die.
Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.
Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.
List Price
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About the Author
Credit: Photographer Credit / Víctor Idrogo
Praise
- “This is a sensual and sumptuous corp de text, a fragmented reality in which, one day a week, the color blue takes a break so other colors may have a chance to be the sky. . . . Matuk captures and distills Otta’s fragrance . . . bringing us into the exosphere from which she gazes.”—Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
- “The Hormone of Darkness is a playlist curated con amor, cariño, and a feral proclivity for the ecstatic activation of queer mutant futures. . . . This book demands you shake your tail toward dreams and desires ‘until the words break down.’”—Angel Dominguez
- “Tilsa Otta’s poems move like light through the body. . . . Sort of shocking yet uninterested in causing you pain, these lines can’t help but delight you. . . . The Hormone of Darkness charts a new thermodynamics—or maybe just the same old one we won’t stop misprizing.”—Ariana Reines
“This hormone is pulling me, at last, out of a darkness and toward an optimism I thought long since burned out. . . . The Hormone of Darkness is a brand-new, lightning-old, slow-motion perreo play everlasting planetarium tattooed on the body of the angel of intimate futurity.”—Brandon Shimoda
