Almost Obscene

ALMOST OBSCENE is Gòmez Jattin's English-language debut. It includes work culled from his sporadic chapbooks, written from 1980-1997, showcasing a jaggedness of tone, approach, and mind space--precisely the unpredictability that made Gòmez Jattin an uncomfortable presence within mainstream Colombian literary circles. Ranging widely in content and form, what unites these poems is the uninhibited expression of a marginalized poetic voice; a decolonizing queerness that challenges the heteronormative as it defies the West's narrow definitions of queer poetics.You could not simply peer down from above, nor would you want to--to enter Raúl Gòmez Jattin's image world is to be on earth with your own bursting, breaking heart. Through this act of translation by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott, new readers can encounter not only 'loneliness and its causes, ' no, not only verses of exhaustion and devastation, but also, somehow, a 'whole wonderful life.' How sweet the sound. ALMOST OBSCENE ass