Nature of Objects
by Carlos Soto-Romàn
 
//////  168 pages
Size:    21 x 14.8 CM 
ISBN: 978-1-9162281-8-4
 
Carlos Soto-Román’s Nature of Objects is a multilingual collection that moves across Spanish and English, across the cinematic and the catastrophic. Structured in three parts — Pierrot le Fou (Spanish), Pierrot le Fou(English), and Nature of Objects (English) — the book explores translation, dislocation, and resistance as poetic acts.
 
Soto-Román writes into the fractures of perception and power. His poems drawing from political histories and personal experiences to make visible what is often left unsaid. These are works that register silences, disappearances, and structural violence with precision and compassion.
 
 
"Try to seize / the means / of production" states Carlos Soto-Román, mid-way through one of the two long poems that make up The Nature of Objects. Both pieces achieve the extraordinarily difficult task of writing--powerfully, delicately, and without-cliche--about the point at which (good) poetry meets (bad) politics. In Pierrot le Fou the gradual unfolding of meaning enacts the process of revelation and resistance and as such engages the reader in its process and message as opposed to beating them over the head with it. The Nature of Objects is (in part) a meditation upon control and creative freedom. Soto-Román does not "seize" the world so much as he embraces it, creating a political poetry that reaches for your hand instead of going for the throat. It is work of huge clarity, generosity, and compassion. As such, it is some of the most powerful and important poetry that is currently being written.
 
-          Tim Atkins
 
In "Nature of Objects", Carlos Soto-Román proposes and exacts two feats. First, the poet enters the lacunae of the unspeakable and wreaks language out from the mere fact of letters - as if Mallarmé and M. NourbeSe Philip collided on the screen of a tender and enabling pillow of artificial intelligence. Then, while resting on our tender pillow, we are reminded that “The eye is/just a prank”, an organ, like all human and AI organs, one that registers too quickly. CSR insists on slowing it all down and makes the impossible - love poetry in the face of catastrophe - not just a necessity, but a possibility.
 
 
-          Rachel Levistky
 
 
History leaves a document behind and it speaks truly of the most grubby and most beautiful. And so through this document Carlos Soto-Román inscribes a vanishing letter. He makes visible the other side of the story, the word. The other side of farewell. In these new poems, I can feel the gesture of some presence of the inbetween; disappeared silences                                                around the margins and in the material.  I love these words composed in an anechoic chamber with ears tuned to absent presence, present absence. Absent abundance, abundant absence.                There is an intertwining of the twinned fates: knowledge with disknowledge, a dance, a weave of death and life. Or, 
winter turning to face winter, another winter, another’s winter. 
Or, poem puts a mask on, that is, a brave (un)face, a bracing   
braced for song in the airy breath of others     braced for action or the   incubation that winter draws in before it exhales. These minimal architectures hold the expectation of earthquakes and they sway so, braced and present. 
 
-          Nia Davies
 
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Carlos Soto-Román (Valparaíso, 1977) is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds a M.A. in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective and obtained an artist’s residency at the MacDowell Colony. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks, and festivals in Chile, the US, and Europe. In the United States, he has published Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press, 2014), Bluff (Commune Editions), and Common Sense (Make Now Press). In the UK he has published Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press, 2019), and in Chile he has published La Marcha de los Quiltros, Haikú Minero, Cambio y Fuera, 11, Densidad (d=m/V) and Antuco in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra. He translated the first Spanish-language version of Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff. Carlos curated the anthology of US poetry Elective Affinities. His book 11 was awarded the 2018 Municipal Poetry Prize in Santiago, Chile.