by ﾉric Morales-Franceschini (Author)
Selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Syndrome scrutinizes the history, rhetoric, and naked power by which Puerto Rico became an "unincorporated territory" and its peoples pathologized subjects. That Puerto Rico is the world's oldest colony and Puerto Ricans the only nationality to have a psychological disorder named after them cannot, after all, be taken lightly. Conjuring an ensemble of chronicles, memory, anecdotes, anthems, monuments, statistics, and theory, this debut collection reckons with the collective traumas that haunt the Boricua psyche, a psyche vitiated by emancipatory desires as much as geopolitical travesties. In doing so, it strives to de-sublimate the effects of imperial power and enliven a politics for autonomy, beauty, and constituent power. Inventive, rigorous, and unyielding, Syndrome is nothing shy of a counter-diagnosis.