Mateo Rodriguez-Hurtado: Hi Ura! I’m really glad to talk shop with you about all things literatura in your writerly vida. There’s so much to run through, like your latest book and how we’re all holding up in these delicate times. In an interview last year, you referred to the fantastic Nicole Cecilia Delgado of the publishing platform La Impresora as a "figura hemisférica.” What role does La Impresora play in Puerto Rico, specifically in the intra and inter-island literature scenes? Said another way, how does the impact of independent presses like La Impresora empower writers and their communities across el Caribe? And how does all of this relate to your new book, Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook, just published by La Impresora?
Urayoán Noel: Over the past decade, Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández’s work with La Impresora, an ecofeminist Risograph project based in Isabela, Puerto Rico, has been key to literary production and conversations across the archipelago, building bridges with Diasporican authors and with literary communities across the Caribbean and Abya Yala. It has published work by important queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and disabled writers, cultural workers, and performers, both emerging and established, and it has foregrounded what Ulises Carrión famously called the “art of making books” as a relational practice, involving authors in the production of their books, offering community bookmaking workshops, hosting readings, and generally centering the situated and the embodied beyond canonical notions of the literary and what Ángel Rama called the “ciudad letrada” that writes the Other out of its limits. In this sense, it is important that La Impresora is based outside of metro San Juan, in the littoral (lit/oral) space of Isabela, a coastal town in the northwest of Puerto Rico. Isabela is where my abuelo was from and where much of his large extended family remains, and returning there in 2021 to visit La Impresora was at the root of what would become Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook.
While we are both from the San Juan metro area, I met Nicole during her years living in New York, where we were both involved with grassroots spaces such as Tanya Torres’s Mixta Gallery and with Caribbean and Latin American communities in and beyond the Nuyorican Poets Café. Nicole details her journey as a writer and bookmaker in her essential personal essay/manifesto A mano, which in turn informed my thinking about what I call “Nuyorican Poets’ Art of Making Books.” These Nueva York/Caribe community networks and relations shaped my own work as a poet, including in Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook, which builds on the walking, translingual anti-ethnographies of DominicanYork writer, dancer, and performer Josefina Báez (a huge influence back to my days living in Washington Heights) and on the late Pedro Pietri’s Nuyoricosurrealist run-ons, which I read as counterflows to the hegemonic flows of racial capitalism.
MRH: There’s a chance she doesn’t remember this, but the first time I met Nicole was in winter of 2022, the night of this epic Rican poetry marathon at The Whitney Museum. You and Nicole and many others—Joey De Jesus, Edwin Torres, Elisabet Velazquez, and so on—kept the energy so alive. I’m sure there must have been a brief exchange between Nicole and I at the afterparty of this marathon, but it was definitely washed over by servings of coquito and blaring replays from Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti. These community networks overlap! Could you expand on what it was like, from a sensory perspective, to spend quite some time in Puerto Rico, and what it felt like to be on the ground at La Impresora?
UN: Visiting La Impresora over these post-Covid years led me to a practice of walking through Isabela (its small urban core, its hills and shores, side roads and even expressways), a practice tied to my situation as someone with epilepsy and a nondriver from an island where colonial modernization involved the gutting of mass transit and the imposition of car-centric suburbia in the image of the US. Through this (crip? diasporic?) dérive, I came to know an Isabela beyond my fleeting yet deeply rooted childhood memories of the town, and during one of my walks I even reconnected by chance with our family matriarch there, now in her 90s, who introduced me to other family members and to the history of our family there as they have resisted the massive U.S.-fueled displacement now happening across Puerto Rico. These walks allowed me to begin to understand myself beyond San Juan, the Bronx, and central Florida, the coordinates of my dispersed Boricua subjectivity. Quickly after these walks, which happened during short trips between 2021 and 2025, I would transcribe my impressions, memories, and free associations with minimal editing and punctuation, inspired by Pietri’s run-ons and Báez’s anti-ethnographic performance texts but also by Nicole’s own quieter but no less subversive practice of making artist books that document her camping trips across and beyond the Puerto Rican archipelago. Although I initially wrote the book in Spanish, I later brought a similarly loose approach to the English self-translations, focusing on music and energy more than strict equivalence of meaning even as the run-ons acquired an especially unwieldy quality in English, which is far less forgiving of long, flowy, syntax and clause-heavy prose. I like to think the result is emotionally accessible (especially compared to much of my earlier work), yet still insisting on the unreadable, the untranslatability of the body and mind as they make and break language.
MRH: What you’re noting about the text being emotionally accessible resonates with me, when reading your book I both memory-hopped to my times on the island as a kid and young adult with my family, while simultaneously processing how the poems evoke a Pietri spectral quality for really any audience that’s willing to listen and present. Reading this book obvio feels like an example of translation, of language, memory, history right?
UN: At the time that I began these walks, I had been translating and writing about Nicole’s camping books as challenges to the insularity and hermeticism of the lettered city and as invitations to an archipelagic Caribbean attuned to anticolonial ecologies. The choice to write Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook in prose is partly a shoutout to the poetic influence of Nicole’s own notebook poetics (and, more messily, that of Joanne Kyger, whom I never met but always admired) but it was also a response to the queer, ecofeminist disability poetics of Aurora Levins Morales, whose Kindling: Writings on the Body emboldened me to find a way to write from the run-ons of my epileptic bodymind without worrying about the resolution of the poem. I love how Aurora’s prose blurs the boundaries between prose poem, essay, manifesto, memoir, counter-history, and more, a poetics of silt that allows for a sedimented language of Caribbean and hemispheric becoming. One of my indelible memories of the period when I began working on Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook was traveling from Isabela with Nicole and my partner Charlie to visit Aurora at her Finca La Lluvia high up on the western edge of the Cordillera Central in the Indiera Baja of Maricao. Island is land. Is la isla. Is I.
MRH: Wow! Firstly, I'm thrilled by this overview and flooding (in the best way) of details, previews, insight, exploration that you offer here as a teaser into what folks may be able to be invigorated by upon reading Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook. I want to bring attention to a thread here about Pedro Pietri’s anticolonial run-ons and how that impacted and inspired this new text you’ve churned out. In undergrad, studying with the great Sandra Ruiz—who we both adore—it became clear that the way Pietri collapsed rules and crafted new frames and worlds to think of performance with specifically his absurdist style of writing theatre, likely too remixed how one might be used to receiving poetry by the ear or eye. And yeah, as a reader, Isabela Notebook tested my attention span because I think I was ready to imagine the text performed and since I’m bilingue like yourself, my radars were thirsty for how the translation might operate, which is all to say it was fun to read your play(ing) on the pages. The untranslatable memories, hopefully like they did for me, offer a hefty sensory, stimulating challenge when thinking of notions of home, place, belonging, in a non-transparent way, to your credit.
In graduate school, I was fixated by the stirring work of the queer Cuban author Severo Sarduy, specifically from his novel, Cobra. Sarduy's ability to suffocate the senses, yet allure with opacity, shook me up and put a dent in my studies amidst reading more traditional academic theory. Are there ways his freaky qualities as a scribe inhabit or manifest in your writing, for live or printed performance?
UN: It’s so insightful that you mention Sarduy and his freakiness as his work so often gets reduced to a Latin American (largely queer and Caribbean) neo-baroque—and I think “freaky” is a great way to characterize how his work balances formal virtuosity with a punk rawness that defies any one school or tradition. It’s funny because I too went through a Sarduy phase in grad school with Cobra in particular and another novel, Colibrí. While I don’t think of him in a live performance context, there is something uncomfortably embodied in his work that interests me, beyond either queer joy or queer abjection. Queer abandon, maybe? That’s certainly something I’m thinking about with Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook. Something like a surrender to language as a trippy death drive beyond any illusion of a master language that can make us queer subjects of the Caribbean and its diasporas (¡escribe cuiribe!) whole. More like Glory W(hole), as in that awesome series you curated with Lili Pujol at Dixon Place. I came of age seeking out such queer spaces of gloriously uncomfortable weirdness (the first time I read in NYC was at an open mic at Dixon Place), something your own performance work channels so beautifully in all its magic ick. I think if I could somehow bring Sarduy back and have him perform at Glory W(hole), I would beg him to read one of his décimas, which are at once formally virtuosic, gorgeous, dirty, and blunt. Décimas are an important part of the Boricua oral tradition and central to my poetry as it remediates the jíbaro music, trovadores, and declamadores I was raised on through my grandparents, and yet there’s the oral tradition and then there’s being into oral the way Sarduy does it: beautifully staining the page. So, yes, “printed performance” is a great way of putting it and it gets to a question that’s at the heart of my work: how do we perform on a page that so often has had no room for us? I think of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (a big fan and brilliant reader of Sarduy and his poetry) and of how Roque writes Boricuas (especially Trans Boricuas) into history even if it requires the punk, anticolonial use of footnotes, and of how his dazzling new Trans epic Algarabía channels something like the virtuosic in-your-faceness of Sarduy’s poetry into an unparalleled “printed performance” that screams in whispers. It is at times unsettlingly funny as it suffocates the senses yet allures with opacity, to use your keen words on Sarduy. Roque’s poetry, with its swarmingly multisensory and (neuro)divergent form attuned to the prosaic and the polemical, was certainly another influence on Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook. I guess Sarduy is that weird tío that gives us permission in our freakish efforts to theorize with and from our embodied inventos.
MRH: Right, right, I think what you’re saying, uncomfortably embodied, Sarduy’s writing gives us a terror of one’s own formation, one’s own body and non-body. Yes, Sarduy’s freakish courage to be weird really sets his writing apart from others. And in Cuaderno de Isabela there does feel like a rugged tug and pull between wanting to confess one’s own disconnect from home (Puerto Rico) and the existential doom of even having a walking, moving, tired body at all. Maybe Salas Rivera’s epic (which I’m dying to read!) indeed keeps writing and performance necessarily in-your-face for today’s dire times. And yes your haunting question that exists in your work, spooks me as well about what to do when we don’t belong in printed, archived work, when we’re not encouraged to be our full, true selves steeped in our sole and shared humanity, that’s rough.
As much as poetry or absurdist original comedy can be a portrait of one’s moment in time, I wonder, if you could inscribe a poem anywhere in Puerto Rico permanently, where would you do this, and why? I'm thinking really broadly here, any example spanning from the earlobe of a coquí, a road in Río Piedras, a tower at El Morro?
UN: I could be fancy and mention some big landmark, but given what the book is about, I’d have to go with Barrio Coto in Isabela, where my prima, the matriarch, long lived surrounded by family. Maybe on her balcony, which overlooks Playa Pastillo in one direction and the hills of Isabela (where my abuelo was raised) in the other. That balcony makes an appearance in the book.
MRH: As you’re pointing out, location, notions of place are not afterthoughts or interstitial only, in your text. Hills, balconies, homes, communities are the source material and animated environment that you enliven and allow to foretell and proclaim on their own. The commonplace and the familiar become something else. Especially since the book is written in prose, this momentum of your thoughts drew me in, tapping into something personal. Speaking of blueprint and stencils of self, I’m struck by your resonances with poets of the past. Pietri, whom we both adore, belonged to the group New Dramatists. What did it mean to you to be the opening act for him for his performance there back in the day? And could you expand on how his mentor-figura presence impacted you, and continues to impact you today?
UN: I’ve written a lot about Pietri over the years and spoken in interviews about what he meant to me as an influence and as an informal, fleeting, yet decisive mentor. We connected through the Nuyorican Poets Café scene (especially the poet Nancy Mercado) and he encouraged me early on. As you note, he invited me (having just met me and heard me read) to open for him at a reading as part of his residency at New Dramatists. It was an honor for me as a young poet and performer and he would continue supporting me, even coming (with Papoleto Meléndez) to an open mic I briefly hosted in El Barrio and inviting me and my friends (then bandmates) Monxo López and Libertad Guerra (now at the Museum of the City of New York and The Clemente respectively) to fabulous parties at his apartment in Manhattan Plaza. Frankly, I have no memory of what I read or performed at New Dramatists, but I remember being struck by Pedro’s vital energy, eccentric humor, conceptual genius, and especially his generous spirit, which led him to bring together poets, performers, writers, artists, and activists, including those with styles and backgrounds very different from his own. He seemed to relish the beautiful chaos of it all, which is very New York and very Pedro. And behind the chaos, there was a very deliberate sense of responsibility to younger creators and to continuing a movement that he had helped build.
I would never claim to be very close to Pedro and I was hardly special, as I know he mentored many other younger poets in and around the Nuyorican scene, inviting them to read and to his house. It was a lesson for me that it’s not about individual achievement or careerism but about something larger than ourselves that we inherit and are custodians of, and I have tried to follow Pedro’s example in my work as a formal and informal mentor inside and outside institutions. Pedro told me that while he had kept his distance from the Nuyorican Poets Café for a while for personal reasons, he decided to come back to the Café because it was too important to not support—it needed to be there for future generations. I think about that a lot at a time when institutions are in crisis all around and when so many of us are impatient even with the counter-institutional spaces our marginalized communities built through years of struggle. Behind the anarchist irreverence and all the playfulness, Pedro was a serious thinker who understood the crucial role of poetry and performance in social movements and in our own journey as creators whose work resists movement slogans and identity silos. (I could say something similar about Tato Laviera, another mentor who also came to my open mic in El Barrio.) It’s my job to show up and to help build spaces and opportunities for those who are emerging now, as Pedro and others did for me, even if (especially!) their work and story is different from my own. Pedro was defiantly anti-programmatic in his politics and I try to be so as well. We go where our people are and sometimes that means we go our own way. There is no contradiction.
I think the last time I was with Pedro was in October 2003 when he asked me to read at a very punk festival he organized at the Café called “Cock Tales.” It was all about penises and conceived (ha!) in irreverent solidarity with The Vagina Monologues. While the concept might seem like some retrograde masculinism, in fact it was very hip, with plenty of women and queer folks that took Pedro’s idea in another direction—which he seemed to love. I’m sure he would have loved your Glory W(hole) series and your approach to curation more generally because you have a similar soft touch: create a space, bring random people together, and then get out of the way and let the chaos become its own beauty and take you/us somewhere.
MRH: Thank you! I would hope either the ghost of Pietri would dig my stand-up comedy series Glory W(hole) that I put together with my friend Lili Pujol. Curating does seem to require this soft touch, as you’re bringing up, that brings folks together ready to be bonkers, and in our case, invite and incite laughter without any disarming or pompous pretenses. It is a merging of chaos and beauty, yep. From conversations that you and I have had in other instances, you’ve at least pointed at or referred to somehow the ways Pietri inspires you and how your poetry zigzags in its own fierce oddity, too.
UN: My poems were always too weird and too long for poetry slams, and anyway, my neurodivergent brain is hostile to the memorizing of anything beyond a short burst of text. Pedro was the one who told me to not worry about trying to fit in with the slam scene (which I loved, supported, and wrote about) but to do my own things, reminding me that, as Boricuas, we have been improvising our own poems our way for centuries without any external rules or judges to tell us how it should be done. That gave me so much permission and made clear the way forward. We make space for each other in our differences. Simple as that. My only regret is that after the “Cock Tales” festival, outside the Café, I told Pedro that I would call him the next week and never did. Life got in the way, and before I knew it, he had transitioned. It’s a reminder that we need to check in with our elders and let them know what they mean to us. And Pedro meant so much to so many. Cuaderno de Isabela/Isabela Notebook is partly about honoring the difficult beauty of creating from our own weird body-minds and letting that be enough, and it could not have happened without Pedro.
MRH: Ura, in jest and in a jovial way, you supremely bring attention to the poles as much as the pillars in our queer communities in the written and enlivened word! This Cock Tales festival seems unreal, and well, the best. To say it one way, I am still working through the multiple ways you’re prying at the potential or the vastness of a/the body-mind, and it feels like you’re saying that Pietri’s Vietnam-traumatized yet surreal, singularly odd mind approached poetry and theatre how he wanted, full stop. I appreciate how you continuously trace lines of thought, intergenerational poetry, and Caribbean kinship. Another layer to your work that I want to follow is the fact that you’re also a translator. During lockdown I got my hands on a copy of the book Puerto Rico en mi Corazon and was thrilled to see one of my peers featured in this dazzling bundle of Rican poetry. In thinking with my colleague from Illinois, Claritza Maldonado, whose poem "hex poem to colonizers, recolonizers, and haters" you translated into Spanish, I wonder: how do you, Ura, ward off metaphorical plátanos-of-empire and racist, unripened maduros in these divisive times? In the calamity of this punitive administration, what tools or lifelines keep you continuing the good fight?
UN: I don’t think I’ve met Claritza in person but I sure love her poem, especially as its concision, badass wit, and emotional tenor all defy translation. I think of my translation as a gloss of all that refuses translation in her original—and that’s a good thing. I am struck by how her poem echoes the violence of the diasporic displacement through which plátanos ended up in our kitchens while also honoring the resourcefulness of our expressive cultures as they confront empire (in all its brutal blandness/blanconess?). I think of poetry and performance as those everyday acts of defiance, like throwing old cuchifrito grease at the colonizer or refusing to translate plátano or to disentangle it from tostones (patacones?), maduros (amarillos?), platanutres (platanitos?), mofongo, arañitas, alcapurrias, pastelón, canoa, piñón, and all our other unglossed and indulgent modes of Boricua nourishment. (My Proustian madeleine is the jibarito sandwich with kimchi I got in Chicago years ago.) The lifeline is that ancestral wisdom, whether from Pietri or from abuelitas whose knowledge and histories of land and people we carry with us—knowledge no government can administer out of us. They’ve been trying for centuries y aquí estamos. It’s a ritual practice, like walking in Isabela or morning coffee from the greca (no moko in my pot). If that sounds apolitical, that’s also the story of the protests that gave us ethnic (and queer) studies. I think of Sylvia Rivera’s fury but also of her methodical practice as an organizer with STAR and of the need to keep building our own spaces even as we keep trying to tear down oppressive systems. It takes both and it all begins with our bodies as they compose and defy the notebook. As scribes we’re indescribable. As it should be.