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If any book has the ability to help us see beauty in a body abundant in transformations–from youthful health and vivacity seared with love and desire, to the slow intensification of decay and disorientation–as well as read and understand these changes through multiple linguistic iterations, Operation on a Malignant Body is it. Will Stockton’s renderings of Sergio Loo’s destabilizing poetry into English are just as challenging as the original Spanish: they diagnose prejudices about sexuality, illness, relationships and belief systems, to name only a few; they are risky in their resistance of melodrama, pity and simplifications; and they are sonically beautiful. This collection is resuscitating, prescribing an approach to how we can comprehend the body riddled with illnesses, both psychological and physical, how we can fathom the reality of illness as ‘a succession of language, ’ because ‘Metastasis is synonymous with fear. And it spreads, ’ just as a ‘body can reveal itself through tests, analysis, x-rays. Not the power of the doctors.’ The body across this book is a ‘contradiction’ between what is seen and from where: Loo reminds us that reality is the succession of language, ‘ and that those who care for us may know how our bodies function, but they do 'not know what it wants.’ - Curtis Bauer, author of The Real Cause for Your Absence, translator of Jeannette L. Clariond’s Leve Sangre.
This dual-language collection of prose poems and diagrams leverages the late prolific queer Mexican poet Sergio Loo’s diagnosis with cancer (an Ewing’s Sarcoma in the left leg) to explore anatomical, linguistic, and social relationships between queerness and disability. With an introduction from Loo’s friend, Mexican writer Jonathan Minila.
