YOU DA ONE

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Jennifer Tamayo's riotous new book, YOU DA ONE, alarms and entrances me. Alarms because of its take-no-prisoners exploration of how the logic and graphics of the internet, with all its distracting, capitalist garbage, interpenetrates our emotional lives; entrances because of its ENGLUSH, its defiant, often stunning provocations, rejoinders, and reclamations, its wild lunges from sincerity to melodrama to cynicism to 'shimmerwound.' Like it or not, the landscape of YOU DA ONE is where many of us now reckon with our families, beloveds, languages, heritages, desires, and self-images; Jennifer Tamayo here announces herself as a fearless, even reckless guide."—Maggie Nelson "Jennifer Tamayo's corrosive, excrementally beautiful new book takes place around two key phrases from Rihanna—'you da one' and 'what's my name'—that could represent the very stabilizing dynamics of the symbolic order: the 'one' tells the narrator who she is. But in a violently mediated, liquified world (shot through with internet ads for drugs and sex), the identity of 'da one' is catastrophically ambiguous (Lover or father? Dead or alive?) and the question 'what's my name' has multiple valences: Is it a threat or a seduction? Hysterical or beligerent? Halfway through the book, Tamayo asks 'Have you had enough yet?' I have not. I keep going even if it damages me, especially if it damages me. It damages me. Tamayo has written a violent, desperate and absorbing book. Don't hate her for her jouissance."—Johannes Goransson