Pause the Document

What’s a pathogen when humans have “a tendency to ruin things” with language? In this bio-political linguistic dead reckoning, de la Torre’s magisterial re-versioning of an infected language system re-scrambles itself into a linguistic hammering, like a pause or a dream, the language that’s been playing us all along.

Mónica de la Torre’s majestic “password in gift form,” unlocks unrestricted access to what it means to love and to be loved within impermanence and loss. Amidst the sentient, kaleidoscopic intimacy of her writing, “the pathology of our entanglement” gets mapped onto everything. Pause the Document is our sensate dowsing branch detecting all frequencies of where language can lead us.

Pause the Document functions as poem, prose, and riddle. Everyday incidents tilt into paradigms and elegies for existence. Reading this studied yet humorous and deftly crafted book is like hanging out with a friend—many turns and returns to cherish.

In this defiantly anti-documentary poetics, de la Torre’s “counter-texts” score “how the poem’s aboutness became its burden” and tease out new ecologies of meaning. Pause the Document argues for an “erotics of intermittence,” a new temporal embodied geography where the self and language are also built environments and where we embrace poetry as a beautifully burning archive, a confusion of excess, renewal, and ruin.