Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico

In these smart and uncompromising poems, we see what’s important, exciting, and relevant in American poetry, in which ‘American’ rightfully spills over the USA’s and English’s borders, over institutional borders, into the larger Western Hemisphere, into the tongues and movements of the people.’—Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Poeta en San Francisco and Diwata

‘The book flowers open in each section; I love that energy. It seems fresh and strange.’—Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth

‘Buzzing Hemisphere reflects a fugitive life when ‘in confinement with one’s gadgets as totems.’ This creolized dada, equal parts mischief and convulsive attack, spins out into abecedarian stanzas and décima verses to reflect the dualities of incorporated territory. In Noel’s countercurrent cadences, where ingenuity beguiles command, ‘buzzing hemisphere’ stands for the location of a geopolitical diagnosis, a hereditary condition, and an acoustic prospectus. In poems that bustle with sonic proxies for the Bronx’s Grand Concourse and with the evidence of at least two islands conquered by market forces, Noel leads us through the ‘stateless hum’ of moving bodies—English and Spanish exhibited as to manifest that no rendition is impervious to the disobedient remainder. ‘I’m a mirror image of a hemisphere in shards.’ '—Roberto Tejada, author of Full Foreground

‘In Noel’s hands, the act of translation becomes an act of poetic collaboration between languages.’—Susan Briante, author of Utopia Minus

‘Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisféricois a stereo ping-pong game between two languages. Neither Spanglish nor translations, these poems are unique to the language, related yet original to both. Noel proposes a new way of reading in doubles or parallels, sharpening new edges.’—Victor Hernández Cruz, author ofMaraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965–2000and In the Shadow of Al-Andalus

‘This collection is often playful and energetic. [It] has an edge to it, particularly in its incisive critiques of neoliberalism.’—John Alba Cutler, author of Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature

Noel succeeds in creating a new kind of compilation, a testament to the limits of genre, and a compelling endeavor for any reader up to the challenge.’—Booklist

'A book of daring, cheeky, trendy Nuyorican poetry.'—Virtual Boricua
 

Along with such rigorous structural framework and play, the collection is pleasingly grounded at each turn in a sensibility able to alternate not only between languages but also between personal and social purpose.’—The Volta Blog