Raquel Salas Rivera's Attentive, Bilingual o terciario/the tertiary

Raquel Salas Rivera's new book, o terciario/the tertiary (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018), is reviewed by Amy Paeth for Jacket2. The collection's poem titles, mentions Paeth, "are lines drawn from Pedro Scaron’s El Capital (Siglo Veintiuno Editores), a 1976 Spanish translation of Karl Marx’s Capital." More about the book:

Whether we receive Scaron’s translation in translation, and whether we read Salas Rivera’s lyric appraisals of Marxist social theory — by turns didactic and personal, caustic and intimate — in Spanish or in English depends on how the book lies in one’s hands. Constructed in the tradition of dos-à-dos or tête-bêche binding, the edition has two front covers: lo terciario and the tertiary. The Spanish and English texts are rotated 180° relative to one another, such that the bilingual reader, halfway in, would rotate the book upside down to read the collection in its entirety. Or — if you are an anglophone reader, like myself — you are made literally aware that you are reading only one half of the book.

The unique design of the book introduces some of the most central claims of lo terciario/the tertiary. First, it is attentive to its own status as an object, or commoditized “product of labor [and its] residue.” The acknowledgments and printer’s blanks do not appear as front or back matter, but squarely in the middle of the book’s pages, dividing its two sections; typical back cover anatomy — namely, the product barcode — is emblazoned on the spine. Poetry “crystallizes” as its “residue.” Secondly, despite lo terciario/the tertiary’s patent work in translation, perhaps its most immediate and material claim is that it is not “a work in translation.” That we are reading Spanish translations of English poems — or English translations of Spanish poems — is an assumption the book physically rejects.

Read the full review at Jacket2.