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After Ramos Otero: Queer Puerto Rican Poetry

August 2022

Four Puerto Rican poets explore desire, queer bodies, and constructions of the nation, curated and introduced by The Puerto Rico Review editor Cristina Pérez Díaz. Manuel Ramos Otero, the first Puerto Rican writer to have openly turned his gayness into a trope, contributes three poems in Pérez Díaz’s translation. A poem by Xavier Valcárcel re-sculpts the domestic and takes on the patriarchy, translated by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. Jacqui Cornetta translates three poems by Claudia Becerra about arrivals, departures, and the shores of real and imagined islands. Salas Rivera also translates three of his own poems celebrating the persistence of poets.

Black and white image of Puerto Rico's first openly gay poet Manuel Ramos Otero

Four Puerto Rican Poets Sing of Dust

By Cristina Pérez Díaz

Cristina Pérez Díaz writes about four Puerto Rican poets whose work operates “in the constructions of queer bodies and of the nation.”

Dramatic clouds over a mountain and ocean in Puerto Rico

Photo by Rick Lipsett on Unsplash

Onto Dust We Shall Come

By Manuel Ramos Otero

I return to the world as I depart, / having birthed another phantom, / a dweller of nebulous coasts, / a brief enemy of metaphors.

Translated from Spanish by Cristina Pérez Díaz

A burning match against a blue background

Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

Embers Fed

By Xavier Valcárcel

My mother and I will burn it all.

Translated from Spanish by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

A dock extending into the ocean

Photo by Nikita Castro on Unsplash

[The sea swarms. Your shout extends]

By Claudia Becerra

The subjects of Claudia Becerra’s three poems, translated here by Jacqui Cornetta, are bounded by the shores of real and imaginary islands as they observe the arrivals and departures of others.

Translated from Spanish by Jacqui Cornetta

Etching of The Rape of Caenis from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' by Antonio Tempesta

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1951

poets per square foot

By Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

we take to the poem, a miracle with no church, with no witness.

Translated from Spanish by the author

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An image of a collection of eggs of various sizes.

"Animals of the Past” by Frederic A. Lucas. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Doppelgänger

By Xavier Valcárcel

she packed my suitcase and said go.

Translated from Spanish by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

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