Madness

Under the guise of reclaiming an imaginary, unsung poet, Ojeda-Sagué moves between biographical notes and poetry in a thoughtfully orchestrated contrapuntal exploration of mental health and its effects on human creativity.

While Madness doesn’t destroy the book as a form, it does make of it a kind of origami, a book with three dimensions, an art object.

Clever and captivating, Madness explodes the boundaries of what poetry can be, what it can look like, and what work it can do. It’s a poetry collection that reads like a novel, grappling with topics of temporality, reality, identity, and belonging. Spanning a lifetime of poetry, Madness contains writing from the past, present, and future, and invites readers to consider how language shapes (and is shaped by) one’s life. Ojeda-Sagué artfully constructs Madness within a liminal space between fact and fiction that requires readers to read from a place of productive uncertainty. I will return to Madness again and again throughout my own life, anticipating what thoughts and considerations the book will provoke upon every read.

Innovative. . . Poetry, biography, and invention rolled up into one.

The reader of Madness may very well wonder which of today’s threats will resurface a mere thirteen years from now, at the time of a fictional poet’s decease. Whatever they may be, perhaps our familiar lives of artistic struggles and life-long loves will continue as they do for Luis Montes-Torres, and as Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué imagines they will in Madness. It may be the fog of daily continuity that is indeed the madness the poet directs us to see.

In this conversation, Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and Sebastian Castillo, both Latino poets and writers writing in the U.S., talk together about their most recent poetry books… Together, they speak on their shared aesthetic priorities and influences, poetic experimentation and procedure, the lyric “I,” mental health, and bilingualism. Their conversation leads them back to the shared principle behind their work—a deeply anxious, deeply pleasurable bibliophilia.

Through the creation of Montes-Torres, there is something very freeing in the way Ojeda-Sagué composes this range of a life’s work, and this range of a life, offering the ebbs and flows of biography across an array of literary forms, from short lyrics to diary entries to longer stretches of prose. Ojeda-Sagué offers how writing is constructed, and a character as well, and how it all might begin to slowly unravel.

Click to read an excerpt from Madness!