Bicycle

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. The outcome of two of four years’ ascetic endurance in the form of biking, meditation, and writing through all sublimities and cruelties of quotidian life and Milwaukee weather, Roberto Harrison’s perseverant sentences–issuing forth as spliced tensile lines–enact in their cycling a vulnerable concatenation of multitudes across the segregated poles of north and south, surveyor and surveilled, bleach and wound. Harrison’s verse might at first appear surrealist, but it labors to divulge actual material and philosophical linkages in spite of all ‘social / crevices’–and to spite the complicity of participation in the mere ‘network, ’ which ‘begins and ends with ownership.’ Listen ‘in this / that places all / the planets / on the phone’ for the ‘dust of disconnected mouths’ that, consolidated, builds both the hope of solidarity in the welter of ache and ‘the stitched exit that a mind makes.’–Jennifer Scappettone