Poetry Books
Full-Length Books
Madness
(Nightboat Books, March 2022)
Order direct from me HERE or from the press HERE
Review in the New York Times
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry
My fourth full-length poetry collection, Madness, is the selected poems of a fictional poet, Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. The poems and biographical commentary reveal the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.
PRAISE FOR MADNESS
“Sprung from the wildly inventive mind of Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Madness represents the selected poems of fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035). The book flows luxuriously between poetry, biography, and what I’m tempted to call speculative fiction. Ojeda-Sagué displays a dexterity with a wide range of forms, from short lyrics to long poems to diary entries. As this imagined poet’s biography unfolds, the book shifts and slips and curls, and throughout we remain captivated and intrigued as travel companions. What a pleasure to be invited into the life and poems of an extraordinary person—after all, aren’t we all ordinary and extra, ‘nervous and breathing,’ trying to find ‘a measure arranged into tenderness’?”
—Alli Warren
“Literary heir to Fernando Pessoa, Jack Spicer, Reinaldo Arenas, John Weiners, and Benno von Archimboldi, once and future poet Luis Montes-Torres (1976-2035) endures in poems of enabling welcome into “someone’s hallucination.” Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s desire for desdoblamiento engenders a poetry of self-possession that wonders, with ear attuned to attachment and mood, who is anybody writing for? Fictional coeditors Javier de las Palmas and Ángel de la Escoba have expertly selected from nine books Montes-Torres bequeathed us in small press editions—lifetimes yet to come that speak the twin language of good-natured cubist intimacy and exile culture shock. In Ojeda-Sagué’s self-fable—a tribute to immigrant dwelling and descent—‘every repetition is / a little ghost of me waving / from an echo.’”
—Roberto Tejada
“Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s grand confection in Madness is the fictional poet Luis Montes-Torres. Through his selected poems and biographical mini-essays by fictional coeditors, Ojeda-Sagué constitutes a meditation on a poet’s life, the life of a queer Cuban immigrant, the life of hermetic sweetness and depression, with a yearning love for nature, boyfriend and dogs. Montes-Torres’s body of work is all assertion and retreat, formally adventurous, traditionally lyrical, obscure and combative. He inhabits the kind of poetry world that Roberto Bolaño lovingly described, of idealism, ambition, obscure prizes, and editions of three hundred, that happens to be ours. Looking back from 2055, Montes-Torres is presented as a minor poet, and that may be Ojeda-Sagué’s biggest ruse because, Reader, these poems will ravish you with beauty, idealism and ambition.”
—Robert Glück
LosinG Miami
(Civil Coping Mechanisms, February 2019)
Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
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My third full-length poetry book, Losing Miami, is a bilingual experiment in grieving the potential sinking of Miami due to climate change and rising sea levels. What are we losing if we lose Miami, a seemingly impossible city formed out of Caribbean migration and the transformation of language? This book asks how we cope with loss at such a grand scale, all while the world continues to rapidly change.
PRAISE FOR LOSING MIAMI
“Here, as elsewhere, Miami is ghosting. And if not from climatic fuckery and erosion, then by the heaving weight of The Thousands. Years? Tongues? People? Desires? Yes. ‘I designed this mystery to be heavy,’ writes Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, whose beautifully disquieting Losing Miami swoons and sways from damp heat and Technicolor house paint. Flies, with their hundred side-eyes, twitch through these summer dreams. Meteorological phenomena swirl in the flesh and dating profiles of the collection’s coterie of Spanish, English, and Spanglish speakers. Yet, loss is the lingua franca that swallows them all. ‘I hate to admit it, but I’m not trying to make a change, I’m trying to grieve.” Even so, these tropic grotesques put me through changes.’
–Douglas Kearney
“In Losing Miami, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague longs for a city he is losing, has lost, which has been built of, in, and through loss. Its language is both and neither, a language singular to Miami and Ojeda-Sague’s playful refusal to authenticate. Here we have a yearning that veers between nostalgia and el brillito of a queer utopianism. It is too much and definitely too little. It is shameless and maybe a little deliciously ashamed. It doesn’t care if there is no return, if there is no closure, if all the roads lead to other roads. This book has no better home than far from home, where se goza como nunca while running on empty into the sea.”
-Raquel Salas Rivera
“In Losing Miami, Florida figures as the locus for family, exile, and climate change in this beyond-book, which commemorates and elegizes the id-beauty of the state. Like Eduardo Galeano, Ojeda-Sague speaks in fictions and dreams and hurricanes in order to capture the myriad currents that shape the geography and history of the state, particularly in the Cuban-American community that he describes with tenderness and acuity in an inspired approach to inscription.”
-Carmen Giménez Smith
“This innovative book captures the author’s reflections on growing up in Miami as a child of Cuban exiles, and then leaving as an adult who worries about the precarious future of the coastal city. Throughout, the bilingual verse and prose poems imagine different forms of loss (migration, hurricanes, environmental destruction), as well as the hopeful possibilities of re-growth (family, mangroves, dreams). Yet Losing Miami does not function as a return flight home; instead, it is a home itself, a nest of words placed on a higher branch to keep ‘the murmurs of the exile’ safe from the rising waters.”
-Craig Santos Perez
Let the wise, prodigious embrace of these poems get ahold of you. Gabriel Ojeda-Sague has given us an American poetry where English is no longer the great white hallucination of literature, but something that is finally more egalitarian as only a poet could sincerely DEMAND! Losing Miami breaks and mends the heart in the poet's bottles of messages thrown into the Atlantic to reach his familial home of Cuba. This book is addictive brilliance, the way I yearn for all books of poetry to be.
–CAConrad
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Jazzercise is a Language
(The Operating System, March 2018)
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Jazzercise is a Language is a long poem that wants to be a smiling, skinny white woman. Here are the leg warmers, head bands, sweat, chants, and two-steps of the 1980's dance aerobics craze, but decked with the baggage of race, pixelation, rituals, violence, and body horror. The women in a hardwood studio inside your TV are so neon it's blinding. But the voice of Judi Sheppard Missett, the muse of Jazzercise is a Language, will carry them along.
PRAISE FOR JAZZERCISE IS A LANGUAGE
New York Times Book Review on Jazzercise is a Language
"The slinky style of Jazzercise founder Judi Sheppard Missett haunts this book of poems by Philadelphia-based wunderkind Gabriel Ojeda-Sague. I had not thought I remembered Judi, but a few pages into the volume she returns to grip me again, her patented blend of syncopation, disco beat, showbiz honey with a drop of vinegar, sex appeal tease. She was commanding the whole world to work it. The demands of the social world on the body are Ojeda-Sague’s persistent theme: the shame and fear on which every exercise empire is built, the potential for subverting these tropes by paying attention to the once abjured vehicle of VCR Jazzercise tapes—its grain and pastel and stray pixels—the power and strength and endurance of being gay and of color in the middle of such a disco. I had trouble imagining this book when he was describing it to me, but now that it’s in my hands, it reads as one of the absolute essentials of our moment in poetry."
-Kevin Killian
"Through the syntax and vocabulary of a dance style proselytized by one, sweaty-sexy, hyper-affirmative Jazzercise camp leader Judi Sheppard Missett, Jazzercise Is a Language reveals multiple and violent registers of racial and cultural interpellation: "I determine the circumstance of my own abduction." Behind the seemingly benign landscape of "six white women stepping to the left," I encountered, strangely and briefly, the little Japanese girl in me with the overwhelming aspiration to be a perfectly shaped, beautiful white lady shimmying in a leotard. Gabriel Ojeda-Sague leads us into the complicated discussion of how we got here by pivoting back to the ever contracting-and-releasing dance around the semantic body, all the way back to the secret that "is in the derrière, the burning secret, the bushel of flowers," where we burn - and burn - and burn - Do you feel it? I do."
-Sawako Nakayasu
"Jazzercise Is a Language is rich with original music and a mysteriously evocative internal movement. It brings us closer to a future magic formed by the tropical energies some of us might keep in our interiors, even if that magic were initially only relatable through the presence of a rooster. Gabriel Ojeda-Sague's poems are 'song[s that] lie sweetly on the wound.' He shape-shifts his interior and exterior selves like the oceans do, and shows us not only that the universe is always speaking to us, but also that it is always speaking to itself in us. I am relieved and renewed as if from a good night of powerful and gentle dreams when I read his poems."
-Roberto Harrison
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Oil and Candle
(Timeless, Infinite Light, March 2016)
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This book traces imagined rituals, failed rituals, and magical objects of Santería in confronting issues of race, warfare, and the precarity of Latino lives. Object-oriented, Oil and Candle localizes biographical, theoretical, and imagined content in a Limpias oil and an Abrecaminos prayer candle (or velón). This book is the winner of the Timeless, Infinite Light TRACT contest.
PRAISE FOR OIL AND CANDLE
“Gabriel Ojeda-Sague's poems, to borrow a phrase from Robert Hayden, are 'wild, patterned, and free.' The language is restless; it leaps and alights in surprising ways. A ghost calls on a landline and 'time/ opens its clouds.' Paradoxically, the non-linear unfolding of sense and music allows Ojeda-Sague to craft a vivid matrix of patterns: identity, rituals, queerness, citizenship, and war. At the heart of this matrix is a voice --discerning and serendipitous -- that moves from intimate telling to a gorgeous torquing of syntax and line. The aesthetic freedom fueling Oil and Candle is exhilarating. All language is at play for Ojeda-Sague, which allows him to score the page with multiple tongues and registers. Oil and Candle is a remarkable and searing book. A must-read.”
-Eduardo Corral
“‘When I exist, / I am complicit.’ Opening Oil and Candle I found myself poured into a whispering ceremonial basin. Ojeda-Sague wields reverence and perceptivity like a sudden dusting of snow in a too warm winter. His honest rhythm, the posture of his questing will rip through you the way that a photograph develops in a darkroom.”
-Sade Murphy
