Description

Giancarlo Huapaya

Sub Verse Workshop

Translated by Ilana Dann Luna

ISBN: 978-1-944884-79-6 (pbk.)

(November, 2020) 

Sub Verse Workshop is a collection of erotic, monstrous, political poems. The workshop is constructed like an Abecedary, in which each letter is a space where processes and performances are developed, involving bio-political relations, micro-economies, neo-mythologies, sexual technologies, hybrid esthetics, and elastic concepts that are activated through mechanisms of evolution and mutation. 
The workshop invites us in, as individuals, as groups, our individual identities fusing with collectives, and then breaking off into ourselves again. Huapaya’s style in this workshop is fragmentary and brutal, like shards of crystal reflecting, beautiful and bloodied. It is performative and neo-baroque, his  poetic voice, the voice that leads this orgiastic sub verse workshop slips between engaging the audience and focusing in on the center of the self. Huapaya’s poetry vibrates, crackles, and burns, moving across the visceral and cerebral planes, back and forth, always circling in to a core of human experience, a painful or beautiful truth about the nature of humanity.

Read a review by Honora Spicer at Action Books

Praise for Sub Verse Workshop

Dense with eros, Sub Verse Workshop courses through the body—through various bodies, in various relationships to each other—until becoming one itself. Giancarlo Huapaya relentlessly pushes language past the confines of convention: he is a poet for whom poetry is ultimately the evolution of language. Ilana Dann Luna’s genius extends that gift into the English language, pushing it further still. Her translation is not a rendering of an established text but an extension—a subversion—of a text whose very nature insists on its reinvention and renewal. Like the Peruvian innovators that precede him, from Oquendo de Amat to Eielson, Vallejo to Varela, Huapaya belongs to a rich tradition while remaining utterly his own. 

—David Shook, author of Our Obsidian Tongues, and translator of Jorge E. Eielson´s Room in Rome

Through the most active forms of conceiving of bodily politics—systematically restricted by its binaries—Giancarlo Huapaya’s postporno book, proposes a revolt beginning with the dynamic textual agitations that subvert the centrality of normative and monographic bodies. Organs open to radiances that extend into prosthesis that write in pluralistic camps, the nest of the distended organic in its specular syntax and imaginaries are reprocessed to open landscapes that illuminate and defeat the canonical and colonial text of sexual order. 

—Carmen Berenguer, author of My Lai

Giancarlo Huapaya’s Sub Verse Workshop is positioned in an inflection point between the rhetoric of a manifesto, the argumentation of an essay and the illogic of a poem. This singular mix would seem radically opposed to any heavy literarity, and in fact, seeks its language on the outskirts of a conceptual metafilmic postporno in which performers, suddenly, begin to moan elaborate political formulations on the very act they are embodying in order to tell us that that’s, in fact, life. 

—Juan José Rodinás, Casa de las Américas Prize, and author of Koan Underwater

Antonin Artaud once remarked that his “Theatre of Cruelty” was created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and in that sense a violent rigor and extreme condensation of scenic elements must be understood as a severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. This aesthetic attitude I think captures Giancarlo Huapaya’s spirit perfectly. Huapaya’s psychic excretive driven poetics mashes up the raw human reach for Life with the divination of machinic souls we too politely call Science. Sub Verse Workshop is a delightfully frightful read, a scintillating exploration of how Late Capitalist informatic waste need not be merely contained and managed, but how it can be projected out—and away towards a new Chronos of Human Possibility.  

—Rodrigo Toscano, author of Collapsible Poetics Theater

Sub Verse Workshop unfurls, silky, before our eyes, like an invitation or instructions for how to create and unmake a tongue and its corporeal and stereo-societal surroundings. In this workshop-laboratory altered possibilities are imagined against restrictions and conventions of a language thick with complex colonial systems, binaries, and terrible behaviorist schema, where mutation and deformation flourish.

—Maricela Guerrero, author of Kilimanjaro

The body as a confused certainty, from what’s fragmented, splintered. The body deprograms its corporality and continues in relation to the self and the others, through impasse, occupation, and sharing. Giancarlo Huapaya’s project through cultural construction redefines our relationships to other, an ever-changing process of construction, rather than an immovable or hereditary fact that remains static over time. The spaces of this “workshop” aim to activate otherness as a constitutive part of the subjects, othernesses that are expressed in the other-lives-in-me-us, and I-we-live-in-the-other. Sub Verse Workshop founds a genetic code and spreads it through a metapoetic in which “You should decide which gland you’ll chew upon donating one muscle to the other.”

—Paul Guillén, author of Historia secreta