Pause the Document

Experimental poet and translator Mónica de la Torre’s new collection is a document of both the events of 2020 and the process of a poet rethinking artistic practice as she tracks subtle shifts in her experience during multiple global crises.

As the world shuts down, Mónica de la Torre’s poems become gregarious sites of encounter--homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by looping the temporalities of dreams, art, the natural world, emotion, and odd encounters under extraordinary circumstances. Richer and more playful than straightforward records, these poems are portals into the intangible dimensions of daily life.

Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in New York City. She is the author of six books of poetry, of which the most recent, Repetition Nineteen (2020), centers on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (2017)--a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika--and Public Domain (2009). Recent art writing focuses on Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas series, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats, and Ulises Carrión’s bookworks. She also has co-edited several anthologies, most recently, Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-79 (2020). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.