Poet Raquel Salas Rivera’s work, “poets per sq. foot,” was featured this month in Phrases with out Borders. The creator just lately received the 2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Greatest Poetry Ebook Award on the Worldwide Latino Ebook Award. [See previous post Antes que la isla…] Phrases with out Borders writes:
Congratulations to Raquel Salas Rivera, winner of the 2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Greatest Poetry Ebook Award on the Worldwide Latino Ebook Award! Rivera’s “Poets per sq. foot” (translated by the creator) rounds out our sequence on queer Puerto Rican poets. Described by Cristina Pérez Díaz as “provokingly epic,” Rivera’s poems summon the muse, queer Caeneus, and the persistence of poets.
Translated from Spanish by the creator. In three epic and defiantly celebratory poems, Raquel Salas Rivera—in his personal translations—summons the muse, queer Caeneus, and the persistence of poets.
“somebody asks if i really feel i’m a poet.
we don’t have a nationwide press, i reply.
we don’t have a nationwide press and generally,
by no means watered, we burn books earlier than
they go to print, considering who reads poetry
from puerto rico in puerto rico.”
Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. His honors embrace being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the New Voices Award from the Pageant de la Palabra, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, the Laureate Fellowship, and a Nationwide Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He’s the creator of six full-length poetry books, which have been longlisted and shortlisted for the Nationwide Ebook Award, the Pen America Open Ebook Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award. He works as investigator and head of the interpretation staff for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Challenge (PRLP), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open entry digital portal that anybody can use to study and train Puerto Rican poetry.