La Movida

“There is an easy voice here both guileless and full of guile, sometimes full of adult world-weariness sometimes as naïve as a child, then looking at its own naïeveté and laughing, and showing us its wounds, a little proudly, a little insouciantly. La Movida is romantic, filled with love and longing and friendship and revolution. It is also Romantic in the old sense of the poetic tradition. Here is a poet who is willing—even desirous—to be torn apart for a glimpse of Beauty.”

“Both raw & elegant, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida embraces the vulnerability of the individual who finds strength in collective struggle. Whether driven by ‘desire, or / the agonizing pleasure / of self-torture,’ here, they exist ‘in complicated love.’ Here, they know no ‘better / way to deal with a broken / heart than a riot.’ Here, ‘virgo could be / [their] gender, or / it could be [their] sexuality.’ Among marigolds, razors, crystal balls and natal charts, Luboviski-Acosta recovers the potency of the wail of La Llorona, a ‘wail [that] will drown you, too.’”

“Reading the work of Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is a direct and distinct pleasure. At once soft and jarring, their words confidently voice a keen level of observation, and quiet power. La Movida walks a morbid path through fields of corporeal indulgence, introspection and repulsion—submission and protest. Sometimes gentle, sometimes bloody. One is crushed and sustained by the weight of these careful, assertive pieces.”