Islas adyacentes / Adjacent Islands :: Nicole Cecilia Delgado (trans. Urayoán Noel)

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EXCERPT:

from Robert Rabin
Translated by Urayoán Noel

 Pineapples and papayas grow 
To all your fences we say No 
U.S. Navy’s got to go

Neighborhood protest 
Occupation of the military zone
Glorious picket lines
People’s choreography
May 4, 2000
pepper spray
rubber bullets
mass arrests
to love or die
the paddywagon
strategy of unity
obstructing military maneuvers

June 2000
first time that a judge
hears a case at the Ceiba naval base
Puerto Rico’s illness of forgetting 
“I also threw rocks and other things”
the role of heroism in civilian enthusiasm
Instituto de Lucha Comunitaria Ongoing revolution
Victory with caution
Fisherman’s Festival
Cheché Ayala 

Courageous fishermen of Vieques 
who took on the warships 
with their small boats. 

PRAISE FOR ISLAS ADYACENTES / ADJACENT ISLANDS

In this bilingual edition, Nicole Delgado’s vivid poetry and Urayoán Noel’s deft translations transport us to Mona and Vieques in the Puerto Rican archipelago. Throughout, we witness the poet and her companions camp in these tropical spaces. While they sleep outside, swim naked, pick fruit, and watch the rising sun, they also confront the environmental wounds wrought by colonial militarism. Delgado’s words render their spiritual communion with islands as her community formed new kinships, saw the open sky and its constellations, and listened to the profound songs at the bottom of the sea.

—Craig Santos Perez

Halfway between a life diary and a traveler’s notebook, Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s adjacent islands firmly establishes itself within the tradition of works that cannot be easily categorized. Using travel and exploration as methodology, the poet builds a personal and communal testimony of a territory marked by occupation, usurpation, and abandonment. The book is an intimate map that, like the constellations that decorate the sublime space between the islands, shines and reflects what the author rightly calls the piercing words of our struggle. That ceaseless struggle, which is the struggle against oblivion, resounds with courage and beauty in these poems that emerge pristine from the song of the deep sea, revealing all its secrets. Ecopoetry meets documentary poetry plus fieldwork as meditation as contemplation as activism equals the art book as art object as document as resistance. Hand in hand with a delicate and attentive translation by Urayoán Noel, tenderness, discipline, and survival emerge in these pages as a new holy trinity, ready to unfurl the twisted song of memory. adjacent islands is a graceful, courageous, and necessary reclamation, not only of a territory, but of our own history, of our very origins, those that no colonization will ever be able to take away from us.

—Carlos Soto Roman

THE BOOK

Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s book art is intimate yet poised toward the radically communitarian, both in the people and histories evoked in its pages and in the collaborative and unabashedly political orientation of her editorial and publishing work. adjacent islands/islas adyacentes is a bilingual edition of her artist books amoná (2013) and subtropical dry (2016), both based on camping trips to islands in the Puerto Rican archipelago: the uninhabited Mona to the west of the main island and the municipality of Vieques to the east (Amoná and Bieké in the reconstructed indigenous Taíno language). Challenging the insularist logic that has historically defined Puerto Rican national imaginaries, on these adjacent islands, people and nature connect in unexpected ways, as Delgado documents the art of survival under military occupation, extractivism, and the surveillance state. Part of a larger corpus of what Delgado calls “camping books,” adjacent islands / islas adjacentes seeks to translate the intemperie (open sky) of the camping trip onto the confines of the page. Delgado follows the late Ulises Carrión in enacting a networked book art where “communication is still inter-subjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real, physical space—the page.” Call it book art as counterarchive.

A co-publication of DoubleCross Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and La Impresora. Order the special edition from Ugly Duckling Presse here.

 

THE AUTHOR

Nicole Cecilia Delgado is a poet, translator, and book artist. Her latest book of poems, Periodo Especial (Aguadulce/La Impresora), explores the socioeconomic mirror images between the Greater Antilles in light of Puerto Rico’s ongoing financial crisis. Her recent pamphlet A Mano/By Hand (Ugly Duckling Presse) is an essay on the attempt “to live with dignity, to achieve real quality of life, to create community in the process and find joy doing so” in a life lived in and through poetry. Her work has been translated into English, Catalan, Polish, German, Galician, and Portuguese. With the poet Amanda Hernández, she currently directs and develops La Impresora, a poetry press and risograph print shop dedicated to small-scale editorial work and allocating resources to support local independent publishing, and from which they also organize the Independent and Alternative Book Fair in Puerto Rico (FLIA PR).

THE TRANSLATOR

Urayoán Noel is the author of 10 books, including Transversal (University of Arizona Press), a New York Public Library Book of the Year, and In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Prize. He is the translator of No Budu Please by Wingston González (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the editor and translator of Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books), a finalist for the National Translation Award. Noel also translated the concrete poems in Amanda Berenguer’s Materia Prima (UDP), which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. A translator for The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR), Urayoán Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.

To order copies of this book outside the US/Puerto Rico, please email us at doublecrosspress@gmail.com for international shipping costs.

Para solicitar copias de este libro fuera de los EE. UU. / Puerto Rico, envíenos un correo electrónico a doublecrosspress@gmail.com para conocer los costos de envío internacional.