Like the razor blade that slices open in the eye-moon at the beginning of Chien Andalou, Alanís-García’s Galería is a drastic and radiant maneuver. What drips from this golden-throat is the full goat-song of art and longing, the violence of exile and the ecstasy of oscillation in the no-place-like-home. This voltified hyperdiction admixes the language of angels, bosses, and books, the toxic wedding toasts of capitalism, the caked assassins’ make-up of Asco and Cahun. I feel infernally alive in the midst of such Hadean fructification. Hell, yeah.

Edwin Alanís-García’s poems are ekphrastic, referential and expatriative – they are poems that wear their mediation on their sleeves – but they also manage to feel urgent and beautiful. This is how Alanís-García proves that the poet is not just a liar but an alchemist.