Copy
Copy is Dolores Dorantes’s seventh book, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers. A collection of inscrutable prose poems arranged in compact boxes and composed of repeating units of language (“Copiously.” “Callously.” “Laborious construction.”), this work often feels hypnotic:
Welcome to the path of your psychosis. Welcome to the path of confrontation. Welcome to the path of your pain. Welcome to your cowardice. Any other path lacks hope. To reassemble oneself. In your counterpart.
As if to counteract the effect of such blocks of text, Dorantes interjects with the occasional found poem, lines of jarring text set below a blurry image of a page from a Spanish dictionary, set against a black background. Accompanying the entry for “Copia,” for example, are these lines from Dorantes: “The means of collaborative production proposed by the Internet is not based on the acritical copy of shared free existing intellectual goods […]”
Born in Mexico, Dorantes lived in Ciudad Juárez until 2011, the year she emigrated to the United States in search of political asylum. A previous collection, Estilo/Style, is also an extended sequence of prose poems that cycle through images and impressions and address an indeterminate “you.” These details hint at points of entry into an otherwise labyrinthine text
[…] This you is me. This is you. From the violated
lock of your own language. To uproot. The tongue, the
mouth, the structure. Completely material. Donated by the
collaborator of the establishment. Unseeing. You’re coming
up with me. Say it. You’re coming up with me.
What makes this work at times inaccessible is also what makes it profound. The writing is elusive and inconclusive, provocative, even brutal. More than anything, it’s enigmatic: Is the above a liberatory invitation? A demanding ultimatum? A delusional mandate? Ultimately, the text asks us to buzz in this ambiguity, in its relentless interrogation of identity and self:
To hate oneself like a God.
Mask of virtue. Mask of greatness. A god. With the gentle-
ness of honey. To burgeon. To transform. To displace. To oc-
cupy the body of emptiness. The decomposition of light.
Pleasure. Center.