Knots in the Throat: Raquel Salas Rivera’s Ballasted Entanglements

This essay concentrates on the figural knots that both refuse and suture readings across Raquel Salas Rivera’s Preguntas frecuentes and X/Ex/Exis. Tracing self-translations, the essay reads how Salas Rivera steals back from English and binary gender in the poetic and translation decisions to withhold, or hold onto, loss as itself incommensurable or untranslatable. His poetics situates Latinx at the hinge and limit of two colonial languages, requiring us to contend with ongoing problems of reference and translation. Through material tropes, Salas Rivera’s poetry registers entanglements and displacements of colonial grammars, transgender terms, and the material remains of empire.