Almost Obscene

A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997) received little critical acclaim during his lifetime, and, as translators Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott point out, “mainly entered the Colombian literary imaginary through an often-sensationalized retelling of his life as an ‘urban legend’ and of the man as a ‘poète maudit.’” As the translators suggest, this lack of recognition can be attributed both to the poet’s position as an outsider, and to his chosen subject matter: “drug use, mental illness, madness, homelessness, unauthorized sexualities, and […] an openly queer poetic subject.”

The poems included in this book, drawn from the many chapbooks Gómez Jattin published in the 1980s and ’90s, evince an awareness of their own transgressiveness. One poem compares a 19-year-old Gómez Jattin to the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy:

Tonight he’ll go to three dangerous ceremonies
Love between men
Smoke marijuana
And write poems

Many poems evoke the whispered reassurances of a tender lover (“Come to the window love / the sky’s sparked a fandango / in its distant bend And it’s not so cold”), while others reflect humorously on romantic misadventures (“I loved Love twice there / And one time Love said yes / And another time it said no / No fucking way”). Occasionally, lines sound radically contemporary, like a screenshot of a Rupi Kaur poem you’d find on social media: “I don’t love you so much but I need you more than this poem.”

Almost Obscene also includes the entirety of Gómez Jattin’s posthumous book, The Book of Madness, which differs wildly in tone from his earlier work, as it veers into the mind of a schizophrenic man in a catastrophically bad state:

THE DARK WIZARDS GOT INTO HIS BRAIN
They carved up his insides with the sharpest scalpels
“You are a woman” They yelled and laughed
He felt a sharp pain in his head

These deeply upsetting final poems further complicate the portrait of an underappreciated and compelling literary figure.