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Pilsen Community Books is honored to welcome Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and Noa Micaela Fields to the store for a reading and conversation in celebration of Salas Rivera's Algarabía, a Puerto Rican trans epic that blends poetic play and speculative fiction.

Algarabía follows Cenex, a trans being who narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf. An inhabitant of a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex leads us through his years as an experimental subject, a stay in suburbia, and not-so-far-off lands as he struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home. His song clashes variegated sources with work by cis writers on trans figures, referencing everything from Clueless to Taino cosmology within a single line.

Algarabía inscribes an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from colonial and anti-colonial literary canons, laughing at its own survival with sharp, unserious rage.

Algarabía sigue a Cenex, un ser trans que narra su vida retrospectivamente mientras navega por las historias contadas en su nombre. Habitante de una colonia de la Tierra en un universo paralelo, Cenex nos conduce a través de sus años como sujeto experimental, una estancia suburbana, unas tierras no tan lejanas y su lucha por encontrar un cuerpo y un hogar estables. Su canto enfrenta textos de escritores cis sobre figuras trans con una variedad de fuentes, haciendo referencia a Clueless y a la cosmología taína dentro de un mismo verso.

Algarabía inscribe un mito fundacional para las personas trans frente a su exclusión de los cánones literarios coloniales y anticoloniales y se ríe de su propia supervivencia con una rabia pícara y aguda.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, he has received a Premio Nuevas Voces, a Juan Felipe Herrera Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize.

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera es un poeta y traductor puertorriqueño. El Poeta Laureado de Filadelfia del 2018-19, ha recibido los premios Nuevas Voces, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lambda, y el premio Ambroggio inaugural.

Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books later this year. Find her poems and art writing in Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the public programs curator at the Poetry Foundation.