Paula Mendoza
Seen on these playlists
Play for Time
Playful and deliberate, innovative and strange, Play for Time, Paula Mendoza’s debut collection of experimental lyric poems, demolishes the literary commonplaces of “universality” and provides a timely introduction to an explosively original voice in poetry. Here, Mendoza wields the weapon of language as she dismantles the longstanding traditions of the colonial narrative, male speech, and the sentimental love poem. Taking on the forms of historically polarizing figures—the witch, the femme-dom, Eve—the speaker of her poems is both submissive object and powerful agent that wills herself caught between pirate and plunder, that rewrites linguistic scripts to survive oppression, that self-immolates into a state of rebirth, that asks what use or meaning can be made of brokenness and displacement. Play for Time is the second winner of the annual Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize (2019), selected by Pulitzer Prize–winner Vijay Seshadri.
View playlist