while they sleep (under the bed is another country)

while they sleep (under the bed is another country) refuses to sweep up the shards of Hurricane María’s aftermath. Written in dialogic fragments and interspersed with prose poems reflecting on the lasting impact of colonial trauma, it is arranged around the two different discourses. The bed on which America sleeps, and which America has made, is built on the fear that the nations it has oppressed will rise up against it, a monstrous shadow in a child’s nightmare. Written in English, while they sleep points to a imperialist American identity: the dormant body of the text. Answering in Spanish, under the bed is another country is the footnote, the monster under the bed, the colony: Puerto Rico. "Flatly, this is among the most moving books of crisis I have read in more than two decades by a frighteningly talented poet." —Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders "Out of the impossible, writing the endless lines of the disaster, Raquel Salas Rivera has been talking to us all along." —Fred Moten, author of B Jenkins and The Feel Trio "Salas Rivera, with stunning clarity, juxtaposes the hollow language of witness with the embodied language of survival, drowned out by the colonial grammars of institutional violence, bureaucracy, and performative politics." —Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian "This is a book with its form as the heart that is its motor and both its center and its shield." —Anne Boyer, author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate and The Undying "Porque el huracán no solo impactó la isla sino también su lenguaje, y es con esas palabras rotas que Raquel Salas Rivera ha escrito este libro conmovedor y tan urgente.” —Frank Báez, autor de Postales