"Madnesspays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."-The New York Times
FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America
Set in a speculative present, Madness alternates between poetry and editorial commentary to investigate how language spans a life.
Madness is a selected poems for a fictional poet: Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a minor name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. This is a story of the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.
About the Author :
Gabriel Ojeda-Sague is a gay, Latino Leo living in Chicago. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently including Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) which was nominated for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is also the co-editor of a book of selected sketches by the artist Gustavo Ojeda, published by Soberscove Press in November 2020. He is also the author of chapbooks on Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. His fourth poetry book, Madness, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. He is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago where he works in the study of sexuality.
Review :
"In his innovative fourth poetry collection, Madness, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué imagines the life and work of a fictional 'minor' poet named Luis Montes-Torres, who is said to have been born in 1976 and to have died of complications from brain cancer at the age of 58, in 2035... Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—Christopher Soto, The New York Times
"Under the guise of reclaiming an imaginary, unsung poet, Ojeda-Sagué moves between biographical notes and poetry in a thoughtfully orchestrated contrapuntal exploration of mental health and its effects on human creativity."—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet
"While Madness doesn’t destroy the book as a form, it does make of it a kind of origami, a book with three dimensions, an art object."—Tyler Barton, Autofocus
"Clever and captivating, Madness explodes the boundaries of what poetry can be, what it can look like, and what work it can do. It’s a poetry collection that reads like a novel, grappling with topics of temporality, reality, identity, and belonging."—Willem Finn Harling, Lambda Literary
“Innovative. . . [P]oetry, biography, and invention rolled up into one.” —Octavia Cade, Strange Horizons
"The reader of Madness may very well wonder which of today’s threats will resurface a mere thirteen years from now, at the time of a fictional poet’s decease. Whatever they may be, perhaps our familiar lives of artistic struggles and life-long loves will continue as they do for Luis Montes-Torres, and as Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué imagines they will in Madness. It may be the fog of daily continuity that is indeed the madness the poet directs us to see."—Eric Aldrich, Rain Taxi
"Through the creation of Montes-Torres, there is something very freeing in the way Ojeda-Sagué composes this range of a life’s work, and this range of a life, offering the ebbs and flows of biography across an array of literary forms, from short lyrics to diary entries to longer stretches of prose. Ojeda-Sagué offers how writing is constructed, and a character as well, and how it all might begin to slowly unravel."—rob mclennan's blog
"Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s grand confection in Madness is the fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres. Through his selected poems and biographical mini-essays by fictional coeditors, Ojeda-Sagué constitutes a meditation on a poet’s life, the life of a queer Cuban immigrant, the life of hermetic sweetness and depression, with a yearning love for nature, boyfriend and dogs. Montes-Torres’s body of work is all assertion and retreat, formally adventurous, traditionally lyrical, obscure and combative. He inhabits the kind of poetry world that Roberto Bolaño lovingly described, of idealism, ambition, obscure prizes, and editions of three hundred, that happens to be ours. Looking back from 2055, Montes-Torres is presented as a minor poet, and that may be Ojeda-Sagué’s biggest ruse because, Reader, these poems will ravish you with beauty, idealism and ambition."—Robert Glück
"Sprung from the wildly inventive mind of Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Madness represents the selected poems of fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035). The book flows luxuriously between poetry, biography, and what I'm tempted to call speculative fiction. Ojeda-Sagué displays a dexterity with a wide range of forms, from short lyrics to long poems to diary entries. As this imagined poet's biography unfolds, the book shifts and slips and curls, and throughout we remain captivated and intrigued as travel companions. What a pleasure to be invited into the life and poems of an extraordinary person-after all, aren't we all ordinary and extra, 'nervous and breathing,' trying to find 'a measure arranged into tenderness'?"—Alli Warren
"Literary heir to Fernando Pessoa, Jack Spicer, Reinaldo Arenas, John Weiners, and Benno von Archimboldi, once and future poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035) endures in poems of enabling welcome into 'someone’s hallucination.' Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s desire for desdoblamiento engenders a poetry of self-possession that wonders, with ear attuned to attachment and mood, who is anybody writing for? His fictional coeditors have expertly selected from nine books Montes-Torres bequeathed us in small press editions—lifetimes yet to come that speak the twin language of good-natured cubist intimacy and exile culture shock. In Ojeda-Sagué’s self-fable—a tribute to immigrant dwelling and descent—'every repetition is / a little ghost of me waving / from an echo.'”—Roberto Tejada
