Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo

These shimmering poems are sustained by a mysterious, expansive energy that merges the horizontal with the vertical, the everyday with the numinous.

Spirals, concentric circles . . . the first spin outward, the latter multiply inward. But how to tell apart inside from outside? For me, the image is a language coiled inside another language, itself coiled inside the other language. It is the perpetually undulating Möbius strip of the self-translator, for whom the interior and exterior edges of the languages put in relationship with one another are not only constantly alternating, but also widening and contracting.

Swirling with spiral forms—oil slicks, galaxies, bull horns—Small Sargasso Mountains evinces, explains, and generates its own iterative compositional process.

Objective correlatives advance Small Sargasso Mountains, a philosophically intelligent and alchemical-driven epic. Ochoa’s sequences— sometimes personal, sometimes objective— reveal and unravel polarities and dualities not unlike the effects of a kaleidoscope. You can’t read it just once.