On Gendered Language
Poetry Foundation Featured Blogger:
When my bilingual poetry collection, Boomerang/Bumerán, was published last year, I felt a tremendous sense of gratification at seeing one of its central elements—the use of non-gendered language, particularly in Spanish—recognized, and often lauded by critics. It’s not as though there weren’t dissenting voices, though. A sister poet decried in a social media post how I’d ruined Spanish, that I’d perverted a few lines of a classic tango by excising gender from the lyrics.
5 CALÓ QUESTIONS:
ACHY OBEJAS, writer and translator, explores gender-free language
READING ACHY OBEJAS’S BOOMERANG/BUMERÁN AS INDELIBLE AND RECURSIVE TESTIMONY
If I had to define poetry in a single word, I’d choose serendipity. Poems have a way of finding us when we need them most, a fact reinforced for me when I discovered Achy Obejas’s new bilingual collection, Boomerang/Bumerán—or when it discovered me.
Being Bilingual as a Way of Life
Achy Obejas’ new collection expands our sensibilities
An Accusatory Prayer
The Sephardic Cuban poet Achy Obejas offers a bold, humanizing reinterpretation of traditional prayers
BY JAKE MARMER
Desire, Memory, and Poetry as a Form of Prayer
Achy Obejas’ “Boomerang/Bumerán” relishes the unique autobiography of poetry
A CUBAN-BORN WRITER ON TRANSLATION'S 'VITAL' ROLE
By Marta Fernandez Campa
Critically acclaimed Cuban-American writer and translator Achy Obejas is the author of many works of prose and poetry, including seminal texts such as We Came all the Way from Cuba so You Could Dress Like This? (1994) and Memory Mambo (1996). Obejas’ most recent publication, Boomerang/Bumerán (2021), is a book of poetry that explores a wide range of themes, including love, exile, politics, gender and language from a multilingual perspective.
Call Me Cassandra: An Evening with Marcial Gala, Anna Kushner and Achy Obejas
From Marcial Gala, the author of the award-winning The Black Cathedral, Call Me Cassandra is a darkly magical tale of a haunted young dreamer, born in the wrong body and time, who believes himself to be a doomed prophetess from ancient Greek mythology.
Shoshana Olidort, Web Editor
I keep coming back to Achy Obejas’s Boomerang/Bumerán, a bilingual book of poems in Spanish and English that interrogates the uses and abuses of language—in everything from mundane speech to sacred texts. “Kol Nidrei,” Obejas’s radical reimagining of a core Jewish liturgical text, stopped me in my tracks: “With the consent of no one, we pray among the dykes, the miscreants, the homeless, the enraged …” In a poem about the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that claimed eleven lives, Obejas memorializes the dead, wondering “if they understood what happened when it happened / if their hearing caught the stranger’s cry / if they pondered for an instant / if they were dreaming or confused.” But there is also humor in this collection, and love: “A lover may be conjured from under a beach umbrella, / via meditation, or a personal profile.”
The Ben Joravsky Show
Achy Obejas is a poet, translator, novelist, journalist, and political junkie. She’s also a friend of Ben from way back when. They start out talking about Boomerang, her latest collection of poetry. And wind up taking the deep dive on everything from the politics of abortion to what the Democrats have to do to save America and beat MAGA
The Wall Street Journal
Ada Ferrer: "I recently finished 'Boomerang/Bumerán,' a collection of poems by Achy Obejas which touch on themes of exile, sexuality, aging, violence and more. Daringly written mostly without gender pronouns, the poems discomfit the reader in the best possible way."
Miami Book Fair Online.
In Conversation: Pablo Medina & Achy Obejas
In his collection The Foreigner’s Song: New and Selected Poems, Cuban-born American poet Pablo Medina reaches back to his six previous published collections and all the way to his first, published in 1975, adding 19 new works. His prose has a dreamlike quality in which familiarity and certainty surrender to strangeness. Achy Obejas’ Boomerang/Bumerán: Poetry/Poesía is a bilingual collection of lyrical poetry written in bold, mostly gender-free English and Spanish that addresses immigration, displacement, love, and activism. Moderated by poet Alexandra Lytton Regalado of Supporting Women Writers in Miami (SWWIM).
La escritora Achy Obejas publica un poemario bilingüe
"Boomerang/Bumerán", de la cubanoamericana Achy Obejas, se presenta este 17 de noviembre en la Feria del Libro de Miami
17 de noviembre de 2021 - 11:11 - Por GRETHEL DELGADO
Episode 287: Boomerang with Achy Obejas
Achy Obejas is an author and poet whose latest collection is Boomerang/Bumeran, poems in English and Spanish that aim to be gender-free (tough in Spanish) while addressing immigration, displacment, love, and activism.
November 12, 2021
Full Circle – November 5, 2021: Poetry and Revolution
Listen to Full Circle on @KPFA to @_DariusSimpson, @AchyObejas @achylandia @guaraguasi & @MimiTempestt @thegoddessmimi explore the power of poetry, and it’s place in revolution. These virtual kitchen conversations were inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay Poetry is not a Luxury.
We’ll share live recordings from @Litquake Out Loud’s outdoor stage 10/16 Revolution Poeticized which challenges each of us to reimagine what true political transformation looks like through poetry. In Three Voices, Three Worlds, Achy Obejas presents Boomerang/Bumerán, a bilingual collection of lyrical poetry written in mostly gender-free English and Spanish that addresses immigration, displacement, love and activism.
Poetry Foundation
REVIEWED BY REBECCA RUTH GOULD
“This is political poetry at its finest, reimaging gender through translation, and in pursuit of collective liberation.”
WRB Latest Issues
Boomerang / Bumerán By Achy Obejas
Reviewed by Noelle McManus
“... Obejas experiments with articles and word-endings to create a semblance of what Spanish may look like in the future.”
Twin Cities Book Festival
On October 11th, 2021, Rain Taxi’s Twin Cities Book Festival hosted a conversation with poets Achy Obejas and Phillip B. Williams to discuss their new books Boomerang/Bumerán (Beacon Press) and Mutiny (Penguin Poets) with Gary Dop.
The Reader at 50
“I feel like my time at the Reader was probably the most important education I ever got,” Obejas says. “It was a great time for trying anything you wanted to do. It was so much fun. I wrote a story once, the entire story was about buying a hot dog and sitting at this place, I think it was just off Chicago Avenue, and watching the traffic outside the window. But I wrote it all in second person. So it read a little bit differently. And they published it, for god’s sake.”
WINDY CITY TIMES:
THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985
Achy Obejas' bilingual poetry book Boomerang/Bumeran explores immigration, liberation
By Max Lubbers
“WCT: The second part of the collection involves a lot of romance, and I noticed that exchange, of speaking to a "you" at some points. What was your experience writing that section?
AO: They're love poems and they're not love poems. They're relationship poems. They're not "happy ever after" poems. They're not "I love you madly" poems.
The disappointments in love are probably the greatest, saddest, most earth-shattering hurts. For me, love has been this constant search. It's sometimes been a very joyful experience and sometimes it's not been. You grow from each of these things. That's the recompense, I suppose, for the pain.”
Achy Obejas with Cristina García - Boomerang / Bumerán
Left Bank Books welcomes Cuban American writer, translator and activist Achy Obejas, who will discuss her new bilingual poetry collection, "Boomerang" / "Bumerán: Poetry" / "Poesía."
The New York Times Books
BOOMERANG: Poetry, by Achy Obejas.
A sense of place and history anchors this bilingual volume, where even seduction might evoke a “layer of the dead” or “the plexus of light,/sound, water.” Obejas moves naturally and exhilaratingly from the personal to the political.
Elliot Bay Book Company Presents
Achy Obejas with M. Evelina Galang
Boomerang / Bumerá
September 13, 2021
Fifth Year Launch: The Cross-Cultural Role of International Literature featuring Azar Nafisi, Michael Reynolds, and Achy Obejas, Moderated by Lisa Page
September 12, 2021
Women & Children First presents:
Virtual Poetry Reading: Boomerang / Bumerán by Achy Obejas in conversation with Natalie Moore
September 8, 2021
BOOMERANG / BUMERÁN
From Booklist:
An influential and prolific Cuban American journalist, fiction writer, and poet, Obejas is also an accomplished translator, and this bilingual poetry collection delivers its lyrics twice-over, appearing first primarily in English, followed by the entirety of the collection in Spanish. As a cutting-edge feminist, Obejas employs an interesting tactic to address traditionally gendered Spanish words: she replaces “-a” and “-o” endings with "-e," which creates a nearly "gender-free" text. The result retains the author's characteristic punchiness (an ode to artist Ana Mendieta is strikingly funny) and subtle profundity ("time is a ruined fountain, a prayer to the sea") while displaying dexterous formal intensity. Poems trickle down the page in thin columns like sweat or tears ("don’t cry, don’t cry! / someone shouted / they were masked / so who could tell who it was"). Other poems are packed with pop culture and historical references ("The March" includes text from "The Black Panthers Ten Point Program," "The Transfeminist Manifesto," and the Declaration of Independence, among others). An exciting hybrid text of conjoined poetic voices. — Diego Báe
The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
Features thousands of biographic and thematic essays on Jewish women around the world.
Author, journalist, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, on June 28, 1956, and has lived in the United States since she was six years old. Obejas lives at the intersection of multiple identifies, but she has repeatedly asserted that her Cuban birth has been a central defining circumstance of her life. Indeed, she has described herself as being “endlessly Cuban,” along with the various other descriptors that she claims and that have been assigned to her over the years (Shapiro, Feal). While she is probably best known as female, Cuban/Cuban American, and queer, Obejas also has important connections with Jewishness and Jewish writing. These connections have increasingly informed her writing over the years and helped shape the multiple and multidirectional trajectories that she explores personally and professionally.
Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Lecture Series
In this public lecture, Achy Obejas, an acclaimed author and noted translator, reads from her work as part of her residency as the 2018 Woodrow Wilson visiting fellow at Linfield College.
CASETalks #10: Mamayan Jabateh in conversation with Achy Obejas
June 12, 2021
Mamayan and Achy will discuss the obstacles of immigrating to a new country, what refugee status means, and the opportunities and difficulties leaving one's home presents.
Zoom talk with Cristina Garcia
June 6, 2021
Achy discusses her new poetry collection, BOOMERANG and the art of translation.
Achy Obejas and Adrienne Perry on Translation and Creative Writing
Transversal Collective Presents Transcreations:
The Intersections and Intricacies of Translation and Creative Writing, A Conversation and Reading with Achy Obejas and Adrienne Perry.
Ms. Magazine: Some of the most exciting and necessary collections published late last year and forthcoming throughout 2021.
Boomerang
By Achy Obejas (@achylandia). Beacon Press. 160 pages. Out September 7.
Activism, bilingualism, belonging.
Who should translate Amanda Gorman’s work? That question is ricocheting around the translation industry.
Twenty-five judges in five categories will review submitted titles and select the five Winners of the 72nd National Book Awards
Translated Literature panel: Jessie Chaffee, Sergio de la Pava, Madhu H. Kaza, Achy Obejas, Stephen Snyder (Chair)
poets.org
In Response to the Murder of Eleven Jews, Including a Ninety-Seven Year-Old Said to Be a Holocaust Survivor, Who Wasn’t
The Virus Has Stolen Your Face From Me
By Riva Lehrer
Ms. Lehrer is a visual artist and writer.
As a portrait artist, all I can do now is reconstruct the mysteries of who you are under the mask.
International Women's Day:
Achy Obejas
“With Obejas, that opened the door to Moraga and Anzaldua. There were other women like me and I took comfort in that because I didn't know anyone like me-gay and Latina.”
LITERATURE OF EXILE: CUBA IN THE FICTION OF CRISTINA GARCIA, ANA MENENDEZ, AND ACHY OBEJAS
Identity is complicated and multi-faceted, as Achy Obejas well understands. A lesbian writer in a tradition often associated with machismo, her fiction skewers traditional Cuban gender roles and concepts of family. In her hilariously titled short story collection, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? and her first novel Memory Mambo, Obejas describes her simultaneous exile from her Cuban homeland, and her alienation, as a gay person, from the Cuban American community. Her most recent collection, The Tower of the Antilles , interweaves stories of Cubans and Cuban Americans endlessly crossing borders and barriers, both politcal and sexual.
Queer Translation!?!
Featured Achy Obejas and Sean Gasper Bye.
Moderated by Elizabeth Rose.
What strategies might inform our practice of translating queer literature, and what are the ethical implications of doing so? How might we draw on our own experiences of U.S. queer cultures in our work, and how might doing so reinforce American queer cultural hegemony? What structures might we as queer translators and writers want to build together in the future? Listen to the conversation, as we seek to move beyond issues of representation to discuss projects and processes related to queer literature in translation.
World Literature Today
The Queer Issue
Achy has 3 poems in the most recent Hostos Review.
{Starting on page 33}
Sneak preview
“Recountal,” a poem from Boomerang, slated for publication by Beacon Press in 2021, appears in World Literature Today, the magazine published by the braintrust that sponsors the annual Neustadt Prize.
Song of Myself
For years, writer/editor Tony Adler wrangled his friends into live readings of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” This year — this horrible year — he talked us into a video performance. This is the whole poem, about two hours worth, in all of its essence-of-the-promise-of-America glory.
The long and short of it
Achy’s translation of Rita Indiana’s shattering Tentacle was honored to be included among some the best work this year.
Thumbs up!
Praise for the translation of Tentacle by Rita Indiana.
Questions and more questions
An in-depth interview with the premier Latino Studies academic quarterly.
NBC News Latino:
Immigrant Identity, Lesbian Sexuality Intersect in The Stories of Achy Obejas
In her recently release short story collection "The Tower of the Antilles," author Achy Obejas explores the complexities of Cuban American identity, lesbian sexuality and the ways these intersect.
There are no upcoming events at this time.