Madness

In his innovative fourth poetry collection, Madness, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague imagines the life and work of a fictional 'minor' poet named Luis Montes-Torres, who is said to have been born in 1976 and to have died of complications from brain cancer at the age of 58, in 2035... Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated. -Christopher Soto, The New York Times Under the guise of reclaiming an imaginary, unsung poet, Ojeda-Sague moves between biographical notes and poetry in a thoughtfully orchestrated contrapuntal exploration of mental health and its effects on human creativity. -Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Clever and captivating, Madness explodes the boundaries of what poetry can be, what it can look like, and what work it can do. It's a poetry collection that reads like a novel, grappling with topics of temporality, reality, identity, and belonging. -Willem Finn Harling, Lambda Literary Through the creation of Montes-Torres, there is something very freeing in the way Ojeda-Sague composes this range of a life's work, and this range of a life, offering the ebbs and flows of biography across an array of literary forms, from short lyrics to diary entries to longer stretches of prose. Ojeda-Sague offers how writing is constructed, and a character as well, and how it all might begin to slowly unravel. -rob mclennan's blog Gabriel Ojeda-Sague's grand confection in Madness is the fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres. Through his selected poems and biographical mini-essays by fictional coeditors, Ojeda-Sague constitutes a meditation on a poet's life, the life of a queer Cuban immigrant, the life of hermetic sweetness and depression, with a yearning love for nature, boyfriend and dogs. Montes-Torres's body of work is all assertion and retreat, formally adventurous, traditionally lyrical, obscure and combative. He inhabits the kind of poetry world that Roberto Bolano lovingly described, of idealism, ambition, obscure prizes, and editions of three hundred, that happens to be ours. Looking back from 2055, Montes-Torres is presented as a minor poet, and that may be Ojeda-Sague's biggest ruse because, Reader, these poems will ravish you with beauty, idealism and ambition. -Robert Gluck Sprung from the wildly inventive mind of Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Madness represents the selected poems of fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035). The book flows luxuriously between poetry, biography, and what I'm tempted to call speculative fiction. Ojeda-Sague displays a dexterity with a wide range of forms, from short lyrics to long poems to diary entries. As this imagined poet's biography unfolds, the book shifts and slips and curls, and throughout we remain captivated and intrigued as travel companions. What a pleasure to be invited into the life and poems of an extraordinary person-after all, aren't we all ordinary and extra, 'nervous and breathing,' trying to find 'a measure arranged into tenderness'? -Alli Warren Literary heir to Fernando Pessoa, Jack Spicer, Reinaldo Arenas, John Weiners, and Benno von Archimboldi, once and future poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035) endures in poems of enabling welcome into 'someone's hallucination.' Gabriel Ojeda-Sague's desire for desdoblamiento engenders a poetry of self-possession that wonders, with ear attuned to attachment and mood, who is anybody writing for? His fictional coeditors have expertly selected from nine books Montes-Torres bequeathed us in small press editions-lifetimes yet to come that speak the twin language of good-natured cubist intimacy and exile culture shock. In Ojeda-Sague's self-fable-a tribute to immigrant dwelling and descent-'every repetition is / a little ghost of me waving / from an echo.' -Roberto Tejada