Pause the Document, Mónica de la Torre
Nightboat Books, 2025
The latest from New York-based poet and editor Mónica de la Torre, and the first I’ve seen, is Pause the Document (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), a collection that follows a host of her other full-length and chapbook titles including Talk Shows (Denver CO: Switchback Books, 2007), Public Domain (Washington DC: Roof Books, 2008), The Happy End/All Welcome (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020). Set in a trio of untitled sections, Pause the Document offers a collection of lyrics that spark and sparkle, documenting an archive of tangibles and intangibles, from dreams to theorums to the void, all concrete, and clear; composed as gestures or monologues that might appear equally comfortable on the page, stage, or at the podium. “I was wrong in thinking just / malignancies could be extirpated.” she writes, mid-way through “AHİ VIENE EL LOBO,” Fatalism will only take us so far; / as it turns out, they’re still viable / in a territory larger than previously / calculated.” There is such an underlay of confidence and authority to these poems that would lean well into performance. “Funny, I wasn’t thinking of communicating in a language other than this one,” she writes, to open “RETURN TO PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY,” “but here I am. Feeling formally restless and leaving tracks.” The poems are exploratory, declarative, engaged and curious; shifting prose blocks to line breaks, a variation on rhythms, propulsion, offering exploratory statements on human language and being.
de la Torre both writes the clutter and through it, attempting clarification through the noise, and a habitat of habitation perpetually overrun by our own excesses. “What empty chatter must they overhear,” she writes, to begin the poem “LONDON PLANE TREE,” “in the polluted habitats for which they’re naturals.” If future alien civilizations might seek to understand how we lived, or at least tried to, one might hope they could find their way to these poems. There is such lovely ease in her lyrics, such as the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES,” that opens:
It hailed golf
balls
back in June.
Notebook got
nicked,
got soaked.
What month is it.
She speaks
of grief so gracefully
you hold on to her
words
lest you miss
its gnawing at you
too.
There’s a curious temporality to these poems, one that attempts to utilize the progress of time as a grounding element; her narrator attempting to locate or ground herself, perhaps, as the poem “DECEMBER,” for example, begins: “Who can say where we’re going. To be sure / I’d split my attention so now looking / back. I couldn’t tell.” Or the poem “FIT TO PRINT,” that begins: “Late in November appears a variant of concern. The news gets torn up.” Through all the searching for certainty, it might not yet be found. Through all the chaos, all the swirling movement, where does the centre hold, one might ask. As the poem “NOT AGAINST THE RULES” closes: “I am writing in the dark / and that is what the noise is about.”
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of nearly forty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), his Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil) is out any day now and available for pre-order. As well, his poetry title, the book of sentences (University of Calgary), a follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), appears this fall. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
