Madness
"Madness pays homage to all poets whose work goes underappreciated."—The New York Times
FINALIST for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
FINALIST for the 2023 Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America
Set in a speculative present, Madness alternates between poetry and editorial commentary to investigate how language spans a life.
Madness is a selected poems for a fictional poet: Luis Montes-Torres, a gay Cuban exile who makes a minor name for himself in the world of poetry before the contours of his ordinary life become overwhelming, stilted, and impossible. This is a story of the unpredictable wavering between anxiety and attachment, between the political and the personal, that accompanies any American life marked by difference. Madness is a study in how pleasure, crisis, wonder, disappointment, love, and fantasy are written into our forms for living.
Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a gay, Latino Leo living in Chicago. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently including Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) which was nominated for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is also the co-editor of a book of selected sketches by the artist Gustavo Ojeda, published by Soberscove Press in November 2020. He is also the author of chapbooks on Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. His fourth poetry book, Madness, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. He is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago where he works in the study of sexuality.
