I first came across the poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué in his 2019 collection Losing Miami, a bilingual exploration—in English and Spanish—of what it would be like to lose a major coastal city to climate change. The book was wonderful: a half-speculative, half-contemporary look at migration and loss and grief, and I was so fascinated by it that when I discovered his next book, the equally challenging Madness, I made sure to get myself a copy.
Madness, too, is rooted in the speculative. It concerns the fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres, and the book is a selection of his poems, culled from eight (equally fictional) books, published between 1996 and 2032—although one of these books, Sailing (2013), was “held in such low regard” for its “clumsy,” “confusing,” and “clichéd” style (p. 65) that none of its poems are actually included. This entire retrospective collection, you understand, is itself published in 2055, a generation after Montes-Torres has died, and it includes, amidst the poetry, small critical essays that support the (also fictional) editors in their assessment of Montes-Torres as an important minor poet. It’s poetry, biography, and invention rolled up into one.
Noting that Montes-Torres has been underexamined by critics, the editors explain that they unearthed him following “a question about immigrant environmentalisms” (p. 1)—had they read Losing Miami, I wonder?—and were subsequently faced with the same problem that all other critics had when dealing with this queer, Cuban American poet. His work, they comment, is just so disconnected from itself, “each book uncomfortable with its place in his body of work, each critic of his only able to hold one book or one poem or one theme to analysis at a time” (p. 1). The reader, thus warned, is prepared for a somewhat disjointed reading experience, and yet the editors, in their stated desire to provide “connective tissue” (p. 1) between the various parts, are clearly hoping to undermine this expectation.
I read this introduction and smiled. There’s something slyly amusing about the constructed academic earnestness of the editors, and it’s underlined by the description of Montes-Torres’s first book, Hills and Towers (1996, note the connection to the author’s name). It is published by a small press and sinks without a trace. It’s later discovered that half of the very small print run got left behind in a warehouse and was never distributed, a small comic tragedy which would make any emerging poet wince in sympathy.
Montes-Torres himself is presented via vivid and entertaining description. Migrating from Cuba to the USA at four, he shares the boat with one person who will become a future Pulitzer-winning journalist, and another who will become a mass murderer. As a child, he crocheted and collected insects and suffered from chronic earache. He did poorly in formal education, and left university after a single semester due to chronic boredom, before taking a low-paid service job and discovering poetry. His main claim to fame, ultimately, is a four-line poem submitted to Kellogg’s: the famous cereal company had trouble selling their Frosted Mini-Wheats and so held a competition for a poem to boost sales. Montes-Torres was the only entrant, thus winning by default—a somewhat limited victory, especially as cereal box poems are “the kind of thing people only read in bouts of concentrated boredom” (p. 49). The poem itself is so indifferent it’s enough to make you consider alternate breakfast options, and Kellogg’s folded in 2028 … I’m sure there’s no connection. Certainly the editors are careful not to make one. Between all this and the job walking golden retrievers, I’m left with the impression of a compelling, if slightly depressing, character: one who would be fun to know but perhaps not to live with.
Montes-Torres’s most celebrated collection, and the only award-winning one, is his fourth: The Ocean as It Shouldn’t Be (2011). This recollection of his trip to the USA, and of the challenges of travel and settling into a new society, leaks confusion and resentment across the page, and not all of it the author’s. In “Due Here” (p. 52), Montes-Torres describes reception and reaction: “Miami says it is already at its ‘breaking point,’ / So we break it. We’ll break it again. / We are crossing into a state of emergency.” No one is happy, and the backlash against migrants is constant from both sides: “It’s no surprise we’re called escoria / At home, scum here, / Prisoners, criminals / Crowding your classrooms” (in “Scum,” p. 56). In “As It Were” (p. 53), the poet records his father’s description of his mother, who remained in Cuba, as “heartless” and, mournfully, he admits that “Many days, I also feel heartless here.” It’s a collection of disconnection, of alienation, of being unwelcome.
Migration can certainly occur for political or economic reasons, but increasingly those reasons are environmental as well, and the number of environmental migrants, and environmental refugees, is likely to grow. The editorial essay accompanying the selections from Montes-Torres’s final book Some Shields (2032) records the immigration sanctions set by the United States in 2030, following a series of hurricanes in the Caribbean. No surprise that such events are increasingly reflected in the creative work of contemporary artists; Montes-Torres, for all he’s fictional, is no exception. And, coming as it does from a poet such as Ojeda-Sagué—who with his previous collection has clearly demonstrated a consideration for the complex interactions between migration and environmentalism—the creeping focus of Montes-Torres is not hard to discern. The editors of Madness certainly spot it: their attention to the featured poet developed from their own environmental leanings, and it’s interesting to try and understand how these three different authorial influences—the real poet, the fictional one, and the equally fictional editors—reflect off each other.
Authorial intent is, of course, notoriously difficult to tease out with any real degree of accuracy, but it doesn’t stop readers from trying. At least, it certainly doesn’t stop me. In a book like this, in fact, it’s half the fun … especially as the growing interest in the environmental-political is something I’ve experienced in my own life, and transferred into my creative work. I’m disposed to sympathy, is what I’m saying, and that sympathy is heightened due to the environmental tensions that backdrop the poet’s life.
In lieu of any contribution from the aforementioned and “unfortunate” Sailing (p. 33), the editors include two sets of diary entries. One of these is from 2024, our current year, and it is a sprawling, anxious, fragmentary record. Three small excerpts are enough to induce both recognition and unease: “Surprised at how many minor frustrations occur during the end of the world” (p. 73); “Evacuated from where I was evacuated to” (p. 73); and, finally, “My life sometimes feels like a record of the deaths of other things. Species, people. I see it until I am. We barely predicted what would happen to the coast of Georgia, to California, to the Philippines, to Vietnam, and yet we did and now look” (p. 75).
It’s speculative, this 2024—Madness was published in 2022, and no doubt written earlier. Speculative, and yet it could be now. (It is now.) And, as Madness seeps on, that speculative, contemporary environmentalism becomes more fixed within its pages.
Dictation, the Montes-Torres collection published in 2024, is almost manic in its engagement with disaster and environmental collapse. Its verse is consistently repetitive, almost obsessively so, and it works to underline the sheer sense of scale and shock that Montes-Torres is experiencing. The untitled poem that repeats “I thought it was” (pp. 88-90) over three pages never actually describes what it was the poet saw, despite describing it in literally forty-five different ways. It’s the best poem in the book, I think because it’s so quietly horrifying. Personally, I think it was a body. I think it’s obvious it was a body, but then people see what they’ve already decided they’ll see. It’s the bare predictions of Georgia, of California. Evidence is there. We just don’t want to look. We’ve decided it’s something else.
Well. Not all of us have. But enough.
If the New York subway system really does collapse due to flooding in 2027 (p. 99), what will we tell ourselves then? What excuses will we make, or are excuses one of the things that die away in disaster? Montes-Torres writes that “the milder anxieties will do you little good now / though they are unrelenting in their small constant need / as we are chest-deep in purchased horror” (p. 105). The horror becomes ever more apparent by the day. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at the science news articles. More dead things piling up, all the time. It’s easy to disconnect.
Implicitly, however, Madness argues that disconnection is not the answer. The third collection of the book, All the Love Bush (2002), is influenced by the poet’s life partner, Evan Bower. The editors describe the relationship Montes-Torres and Bower enjoyed over three decades as a romance of two people who quickly “fell into habit with each other” (p. 33). Of the eight books surveyed in Madness, All the Love Bush is perhaps the most concerned with connection. Moreover, it focuses—or at least the selection curated by the editors does—on how necessary that connection is in a destabilising world. The poem “Obsessions” (p. 43) records a compulsion with the length of time it takes a glacier to melt, and the constant refrain of “When I’m Afraid With You” (p. 40) describes a repetitive anxiety that is somewhat ameliorated by closeness. “Project” (p. 42) is perhaps the most affecting for its shoring up of self-worth through connection to another: “We suspect we have been mistaken / for someone else when we’re desired, / someone who must look just like us / but steadier, easier to talk to, kinder to waiting.”
If the editors came to Montes-Torres through a path of “immigrant environmentalisms” then All the Love Bush might arguably be an effective point of entry into the poet’s work. Ojeda-Sagué’s focus on migration and climate change in Losing Miami is itself an illustration of anxiety and a continual teetering on the edge of loss—finding ways to navigate new communities and new environments, and making up connections there, is an inescapable, even a rational response to grief. Being able to build those relationships is a necessary part of resilience, of being a steadier, kinder self in an anxiety-inducing world. Why not be kinder? Why not be steadier? What’s the worst that could happen.
Madness begins with fictional editors describing the disconnected works of a fictional author. As the collection goes on, it becomes apparent that the connection is the background. Montes-Torres’s separate books are increasingly influenced by migration and environmental change, and their similarity lies in the fact that he reacts to these things, and not in how his reactions relate to each other. Change elicits different responses. It should. We are not so consistent that the increasing influence of “the end of the world” makes no impact on our creative response. It’s rational to try different approaches, to see what sticks, what’s no longer useful, and what can become so.
We should all be so innovative.