About OcSerp

My first chapbook, El Océano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent, was published by Zenane Independent Media in late 2004. It might not sound like much to say it was the most ambitious things I’d written to date – I wrote it when I was 22-23 – but I was trying to produce something genuinely original.

OcSerp is multilingual, primarily Spanish and English. These languages face each other across the book’s gutter, mirroring each other. You’ve seen a layout like this before in translated volumes of poetry. Where there is a line break in one place, there is a line break in the other; where one has an indentation, so does the other. The difference here is that these are not translations.

The left-hand page, in Spanish, represents the voices of something very much like the Aztec Empire. The right-hand page, in English, is something very much like the conquering Spaniards. It’s not a 1:1 relationship, however. Other voices spill in, and the mythic nature of two cultures clashing echoes out and out and out to the sides of the pages.  It’s about religions intersecting, mostly violently, about violence itself, about language.

OcSerp is now out of print, though I’d very much like to find a new publisher for it. It was a letterpress chapbook, beautifully made, but I’d just be happy to see it in print again. I made a handful of copies, myself, when it was placed on the syllabus for the American Studies gateway course at Texas A&M one semester, but a broader second printing would be nice. If you are or know of a publisher looking for some challenging and thoughtful bilingual work, please use my contact form to drop me a line.

Cover Image

Sample Poems

el truco

en el sueño ya
estábamos
muertos

the trick

in the space between
ship and shore we became
gods

espejo

Blanco significa.

Caliente como.
Estrellas como cuerpos.

Significia frío.
Como esculturas.

Como cadáveres.
Significia con negro.
Una sistema.

Como el espacio entre.
Estrellas como palabras.
En una página.

Como el Océano.
Como la Serpiente como.
Ellos son lo mismo.

Significa poder.

sic transit gloria mundi novi

I am.

The sword the.
Lamp.

I am the father.
And the son the ghost.

Maker.
Of this splintered.
Eden.

I am the conqueror.
Thus the distance.
Between us grows.

The wyrm.
Turning on its tail.
Screaming.

I feast on infinity.