July 2019, Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico

July 2019, Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico

 

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ESSAYS

An Arsenal of Mysteries: On Mona Island The New York Times Magazine, March 2024

The island dramatized every rupture, deepened every longing. But don’t we always make our lives among ruins, run to catch the bus over unmarked graves, share the corner store with stateless people?

Step Back: On Carmen de Lavallade The New York Times Magazine, August 2023

As with a dancing body, the past has a bewildering vitality, “it jumps around” and makes us sweat through endless rehearsals.

Leaving Therapy Made It Possible To Imagine Going Back The New York Times Magazine, May 2023

I felt loyal to my malaise, like the child who refuses every doll, game or excursion — stubborn in the unhappy dignity of her disinterest.

Aguacero The Paris Review Daily, February 2023

This wetness won’t make you less thirsty.  

Cecilia Vicuña’s Art of Repair The New York Times Magazine, August 2022

Practice begets knowledge, or at the very least new ways of knowing. What could it mean to write without words? How are we woven into histories we’ve never heard?

Bodies on the Line The New York Times Magazine, Cover Story, September 2021 (National Magazine Award Winner, Longform Best of the Year)

Especially now, we’re tormented by the volatile future, the anxiety of adaptation. But dancing activates the pleasure in this roiling field of possibilities, makes it feel as if there will always be another chance to choose. To reset the connection. To find opportunity in error.

The World According to Bad Bunny The New York Times Magazine, Cover Story, October 2020 (Longform Best of the Year)

Remember? It was a whole season of nights like that, with his music in our headphones and his music at large in the streets. We couldn’t always tell whether we were hearing one voice singing many songs, or many voices singing one.

It’s Not Too Late The Believer, August 2020

No one is ever known completely—not the friend, not the lover, perhaps least of all the star. A “deep cut” like the Soul Train duet marks the limits of our knowledge, beckons from the shadows like a woman smoking in a robe and wig cap glimpsed through a bedroom door.

Pandemic Diary NYRB Daily, April 2020

If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it.

The Ladder Up: A Restless History of Washington Heights Virginia Quarterly Review, December 2019 (National Magazine Award Finalist)

The term “inner city” has never provided an accurate map of racialized urban poverty—what’s inner about a geography that drifts with the people it stigmatizes?—but I’ve always found it vaguely spiritual, as if the city carries a secret close to its heart, and only poor people are privy to it.

Looking for Ana ZORA, September 2019

Before her return to Cuba, Ana Mendieta confessed deep anxiety: “What if I find out it has nothing to do with me?”

An Essay in Letters with Raquel Salas Rivera The New Inquiry, May 2019

Freedom begins with saying no to unfreedom.

Dancing Backup: Puerto Ricans in the American Muchedumbre Longreads, April 2019

We can shimmy and shake all we like, get loud and proud about how well we do it. But even when the backup dancer gets to be a star, she’s on the blink, appearing and disappearing like the bright spot on the nocturnal satellite map before and after Hurricane Maria.

I Think I Lost It Popula, October 2018

When Lucinda Williams was at the far end of what men consider young—27, to be precise—she recorded an album called Happy Woman Blues. Each word in the title repels the others: Can you be happy and sing the blues? Can you be a woman and sing the blues? Can you be happy and a woman?

Letter of Recommendation: Translation The New York Times Magazine, October 2017

Who can afford to remain untranslated?

The Uses of Beauty: On Daughters of the Dust and Diasporic Inheritance LARB, July 2017

Any point in diaspora can be the cutting edge if you have the nerve to touch it.

By Heart The Point, July 2016

It’s possible to think of poetry differently: not as that which imposes a memorable pattern on the chaos of the world, but as those patterns we can’t escape, a ritual form for what we can’t stop remembering anyway.

Dead Quiet, White Noise: On Clarice Lispector & Alejandra Pizarnik Lit Hub, November 2016

Preténdeme blanca.

Melancholy Charms The Point, June 2015

Sometimes depression can work like the devil’s tuning fork, pointing toward the poisoned river running beneath the surface of our society. But depression also is that river, the sign that what we cannot sense, source or solve—whether illness or sweetness, fact or feeling—retains its own reality. 

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CRITICISM

Fairytale: On the Pointer Sisters Oxford American, December 2022

The harmonies are seamless but the dancing is unruly, almost slapstick, as if history’s a choreography you should never learn too well.

This Laborer Called A Writer: On Leonard Cohen The Paris Review Daily, June 2022

His flat-footed rhythm makes wisdom’s weight hit harder.

Savoring Pineapples: A New, Stealthy Kind of Protest Music The New York Times Magazine, March 2022

Loss both stimulates and spoils our taste for living. Even these songs of desire seem stretched thin by distance from a world on the brink of disappearance.

La Doña Was Ready To Be A Pop Star The New York Times Magazine, March 2021

“La vida me cuesta / ¿Quién me la paga?” Under the pressure of repetition, the lyric phrase releases its full range of meanings… “Who will pay?” Who will face responsibility for the lives sacrificed to profit?

The Lives They Lived: Diane di Prima The New York Times Magazine, December 2020

The Revolutionary Letters warn against “the tale, so often told” in times of crisis, “that now we must organize, obey the rules, so that later we can be free.” Di Prima wasn’t one to wait for history to authorize the freedoms she desired.

Let West Side Story and Its Stereotypes Die The New York Times, February 2020

I’m not above quoting Anita in my advice to the American entertainment industry and its many captive audiences: “Forget that boy, and find another.”

The Museum as Mangrove Frieze, July 2019

New York is an embattled site for Puerto Ricans: at once a homeland in translation, a hotbed of racism, and a strategic point from which to build popular power and organize for sovereignty. The Brigada hopes to enter the fray through this third door.

What’s Past Is Prologue: On Cherríe Moraga Bookforum, June 2019

It’s tempting to say, these days, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” But holding on to the ways we may not be is also a way of holding on to our mutual humanity.

Natal Promise, Natal Debt The Common / Ediciones Aguadulce, October 2018

The poems Mara Pastor produces out of the struggle to survive do not redeem ruined words so much as account, patiently, for their ruin and remaking.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha, and Other Immortal Mortals Lit Hub, September 2017

The work of art is far from the only form art takes. As Marx teaches us, when we fetishize the commodity we disappear the labor of its making. Not to mention all the making that does not result in commodities: making the bed, making dinner, making love, making time, making do.

The Internal Exile of Dulce María Loynaz The New Yorker online, August 2017

What does it mean to stay without staying, or to leave without leaving?

They Want That New New World: On M. NourbeSe Phillip Boston Review, March 2016

The dream of emancipation from bondage cannot and should not emancipate us from our human bonds, though these too may chafe.

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POETRY

The Aunts MOMA Magazine, October 2023

Between a grown woman and her naked image,
a motherless child. Motherless because unwanted
and unreal. Still, she cries and snatches at the woman’s mind,
as if to say—you don’t need to be my mother to save my life.

Anniversary Jewish Currents, August 2020

Let’s practice walking a mile out, a mile back
both in the direction of danger.

Mutt Life The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNext, May 2020

who knows who she is I
keep the bitch on a leash
when we walk all night
I dream I have a spare
self to cage and bone
my bitch I do with her
whatever I won’t

The Steeple No Tokens, October 2017

All day my heart is a book with a ribbon in it…

Middle Distance; Now and Then The Offing, February 2017

...The moon is full 
as an angel’s throat and you spit in it
as a girl spits with her father
in the ditch by the road by the river.

Lullaby The Shallow Ends, January 2017

I’m bedding down
in this moment with my sadness,
I’m lining the bassinet with pale ferns.

When I’m Not on the Internet I Am the Internet Prelude, February 2016

Demimondes singing in the voices of snowflakes—strawberry patch of troubles.

Hemisphere The Awl, August 2014

If you enter, you will die.

INTERVIEWS

History Is All There: Julie Dash The Believer, December 2020

“Composing shots is kind of like writing poetry with images: you want to be able to say something using the words everybody knows, but the phrasing is different.”

Owning Brooklyn: Naima Coster The Paris Review Daily, January 2018

“Sometimes when I’m writing I’ll smile or frown or evoke a memory to see what kinds of sensations it brings up in my body. But I don’t think that’s something that I was formally trained to do in my study as a writer—to be attentive to what’s happening inside a body.”

Cannibal Logic: Michael C. Vazquez Transition, January 2011

“...culture as the great chain of swallowing.”