Dream Caravan Dream, with Mónica de la Torre

“If an utterance is a curve,” Mónica de la Torre writes in “Parable,” the second poem from her new collection Pause the Document, “all of its points are at an equal but growing distance from its focus.” Written amidst the upheavals of the pandemic, the poems in Pause the Document play with language and its limits, both documenting an era of socio-political crisis and calling attention to the inevitable failures of that documentation. De la Torre attends to dreams, illness, geometry, meaning, trees, healing, and boredom with curiosity and brilliance.

For Dream Caravan Dream, Triple Canopy and Nightboat will celebrate the publication of Pause the Document with readings from Monica de la Torre, Veronica Gonzalez Peña, James Hannaham, Valeria Luiselli, and Timmy Straw. The readers will each share their own “paused documents, ”thinking about the title as a command, a respite, a dictation. A reception will follow, and copies of the book will be available for purchase.

Mónica de la Torre is a poet, translator, and scholar, born and raised in Mexico City. Her books include Pause the Document (2025), Repetition Nineteen (2020), Public Domain (2008), and Talk Shows (2007). De la Torre has edited BOMB Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Creative Capital grant, and teaches poetry and translation at Brooklyn College.