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Urayoán Noel University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2014, 227pp., $44.95,
ISBN: 978-1609382445 (paperback)
For as long as I can remember, literary critics have been declaring the failure of poetry to keep its public audience. Titles such as, "Who Killed Poetry?" and "Can Poetry Matter?" seem to confirm that fact for academic audiences. However, those of us who have recently visited the Nuyorican Poets Café on a weekend night have experienced a three-blocks-long line, and a great cultural mix of young poetry lovers, patiently waiting to enter the place. "Are you here for the slam?" a young man holding the Dominican and Puerto Rican flags asked us; and I remembered the article, where Miguel Algarín, former Rutgers University professor and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, dubbed the practice of the poetry slam, "the democratization of verse."
On that occasion, I thought "place/space" was the glue that could hold together a Nuyorican poetry movement. I had come from Chicago, the city where slam poetry was born, to visit the place where New York Puerto Ricans, resisting colonialism, birthed themselves in their poetic voice as Nuyoricans. However, after reading In Visible Movement by Urayoán Noel, I have come to the realization that Nuyorican poetry followed, and continues to follow a process - inside and outside of the Nuyorican Poets Café - that birthed, and continues to birth us all, as NeoRicans, NoRicans, AmeRicans, Mexi-Ricans and as all the myriad possibilities of Puerto Rican identity.
Urayoán Noel, poet, performer, professor, in...