Taking root in the discordant influences of Walt Whitman and Puerto Rican poet Manuel Ramos Otero, and in the exposed cracks of the nation-building project, The Founding of The Country is simultaneously utopian dream and post-colonial critique. The long poem tells a fragmentary narrative of two lovers—one languid and liquid, the other sharp as exclamation points—who are also two nations bound in a horrendous love. Whitman’s athletics finds itself dismembered in the impossibility of the colonial situation. The non-optimistic voice takes over to renounce the hopes of tamable landscapes and sings the erasure of the tropes of foundational histories.

“Pérez Díaz’s debut takes us through intimate and political expeditions that challenge our understanding of language, territory, and human relationships.”
—Mara Pastor