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Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta was raised in Los Angeles, California by a family of single women, and grew up traveling and living across the western United States and Mexico with their mother, a cultural anthropologist. Tatiana's first book,The Easy Body, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2017; their writing has appeared inSFMOMA Open SpaceandWolfman New Life Quarterly. They live in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, around the corner from where they work as a barista at a pop and pop cafe video rental store hybrid and as a peer sexual health educator at CCSF's Project SURVIVE.
Inspiration: handy stuff, if you can find it. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta secured theirs in the revolutionary struggles of Chicana feminists and Spain's Post-Franco queer punk movement, so this collection doesn't play nice with fascists and colonizers. -Matt Sutherland, Foreword Both raw & elegant, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's La Movida embraces the vulnerability of the individual who finds strength in collective struggle. Whether driven by 'desire, or / the agonizing pleasure / of self-torture,' here, they exist 'in complicated love.' Here, they know no 'better / way to deal with a broken / heart than a riot.' Here, 'virgo could be / [their] gender, or / it could be [their] sexuality.' Among marigolds, razors, crystal balls and natal charts, Luboviski-Acosta recovers the potency of the wail of La Llorona, a 'wail [that] will drown you, too.' -Wendy Trevino At once soft and jarring, LA MOVIDA walks a morbid path through fields of corporeal indulgence, introspection and repulsion-submission and protest. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's work voices keen self-observation, and a fiercely unique power to confront and envelope simultaneously, with compassion. One is crushed and sustained by the weight of these careful, assertive pieces. -Liz Harris There is an easy voice here both guileless and full of guile, sometimes full of adult world-weariness sometimes as naive as a child, then looking at its own naievete and laughing, and showing us its wounds, a little proudly, a little insouciantly. La Movida is romantic, filled with love and longing and friendship and revolution. It is also Romantic in the old sense of the poetic tradition. Here is a poet who is willing-even desirous-to be torn apart for a glimpse of Beauty. -Julian Talamantez Brolaski Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta's La Movida is an ecstatic shriek, a horror-feminist wail-song bellowing from a dark pit, where the ones covered in lucent blood vibrate with the eros of insurrection. Witchy, unapologetic, mythic-these incandescent poems avow, with a queer punk irreverence, the dismembering force of desire and the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial vengeance. Let yourself be cut by Luboviski-Acosta's razor-sharp verse. -Jackie Wang
