In this poem, the speaker writes a letter to the lions in the Mayagüez zoo, located in Puerto Rico’s west coast. Held by this energy, I heard the poem “notas sobre las temporadas/notes on the seasons” and felt all of the hairs on my body raise. Sure enough, Salas Rivera turned his book presentation into a celebration of queer and trans love and acceptance. Around this time, news of this transwoman’s brutal killing was making headlines in Puerto Rico. An altar in memory of Alexa Negrón Luciano occupied one corner of the broad and airy space. The whole room radiated with cuir energy. Salas Rivera was not the only one to read that night he read alongside a group of local poets, many of whom identify as queer and trans. I was lucky enough to attend the book presentation of X/EX/EXIS at Betalocal in Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico. Expanding on the heteronormativity of feminist and nationalist discourses, Salas Rivera writes queerness into a poetic language that denies the national romances embedded in Spanish and English. 2 X/EX/EXIS elucidates how this “foreignness” plays out linguistically, where languages deny the queer subject. Relatedly, queer scholars and activists critique how queerness in the Caribbean is often considered a foreign threat.
Caribbean feminism has long been concerned with sexual citizenship, 1 that is, with how nation-building requires the naturalization of a cis-het citizen. Raquel Salas Rivera’s poetry collection, X/EX/EXIS, declares itself, in its subtitle, as “poemas para la nación/poems for the nation.” Specifically, these poems consider the role of language in queer and trans Caribbean futures. To not be mirrored in a language is to be denied entry into the nation.
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