Toby Altman Reviews Jose-Luis Moctezuma's Debut, Place-Discipline

For On the Seawall, Toby Altman reviews Place-Discipline (Omnidawn, 2019), the first book of poems by Jose-Luis Moctezuma. "For Moctezuma, colonialism is a kind of cancer, violent and rapacious, always moving, metastasizing, spreading," writes Altman. "But he also describes colonialism as a temporality, nationtime."

After a study of the collection's penultimate poem, "Homage À Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable," which "offers an equivocal tribute to the city’s true founder, a Haitian Jesuit and fur trader, who settled on the marshy banks of the Chicago River in the 1780s," Altman writes:

I have dwelled on this poem at length because it embodies one of signal ambitions — and achievements — of Moctezuma’s poetry. For Moctezuma, it is the task of poetry to widen historical vision—and, in the process, to indict the narrowness and rigidity of capitalist time. This may seem like a perversely theoretical project for a poet to take on. But Moctezuma writes poetry as its own kind of theoretical performance. He does not produce texts to be decoded by theory (or by literary critics, for that matter). Rather, he produces poems that are themselves theories, that perform their arguments in the way stage reference, history, and space. Poetry allows him to slip outside the boundaries of the reasonable and the empirical: to make arguments that soar past epistemic and methodological limits. One can see this adventurous disregard for the usual standards of academic argumentation in the way Moctezuma marshals and deploys references. Place-Discipline is a book dizzy with reference — from Chase Bank to the Egyptian God Osiris; from the Toltecs to the Robert Taylor Homes. Characteristically, Moctezuma refuses to order and organize these references, to place them in a historical hierarchy. Rather, on his pages, references collide with each other, producing sparks of possibility.

Find the full review at On the Seawall.