Lara Mimosa Montes's Abstractions Bloom Into Critique in THRESHOLES

"Fragmented and emergent, THRESHOLES draws together an expansive range of topics on death, the body, trauma, knowledge, healing, oppression, language, and art," writes Rachel Carroll at LARB about poet Lara Mimosa Montes's anticipated second book. Further in, Carroll touches on Montes's exploration of body memory. More:

Montes not only examines the unmaking and remaking of the body through writing, but also through place. THRESHOLES moves between two urban homes, the Bronx and Minneapolis, with the Bronx playing a privileged role. Montes thus reclaims the traditionally masculine figure of the flâneur, the wanderer of the urban landscape whose observations organize the city’s teeming complexity. THRESHOLES focuses especially on works of art with connections to the Bronx made in the 1970s and 1980s, the decade or so prior to Montes’s birth. This was a period of extreme social and economic struggle for the Bronx, especially for Black and Latinx residents. In the fallout from racist redlining policies and “urban renewal” projects, most notably the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the borough suffered extreme housing insecurity and the loss of essential services. As is often the case, the intensity of oppression coincided with incredible artistic ingenuity. As the city and capital abandoned the Bronx, a spirit of radical community-based creativity took hold.

Many of the Bronx-based works explored in THRESHOLES bear the trace of this structural violence...

Read on at Los Angeles Review of Books.