reviewed on July 11, 2025

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Translated from the Spanish by Ryan Greene, Giancarlo Huapaya’s [gamerover] looks like no other book of poetry I have seen, each page a dense matrix of fragmented phrases, tactical white space, isolated single words, and columns of text as legible vertically as horizontally.  In this way, the long, layered poems in [gamerover] resemble erasures, but they are in fact highly citational collages drawn from a staggering range of sources, from collections like Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth and Brandon Shimoda’s The Desert—which gets significant space in the book—to reports from the United States General Accounting Office, dialogue from John Ford’s Stagecoach, Nextdoor posts, and the catalog of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago.

 

Manipulating the gaps, slippages, and juxtapositions among these sources, Huapaya and Greene construct a brilliant Deleuzian reading of the American West, showing how contemporary corporate ownership of urban space, in particular in Phoenix, reiterates and elaborates on settler colonialism, and how both practices refract through an American culture industry well-skilled at laundering the nation’s history.  As in Deleuze, [gamerover] is a book of folds, vectors, territories, laminations, over-lappings, and lines of flight, but it is also a book of automobiles and automatic rifles, shown to be linked in an insidious cultural logic:

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her father        came toward me                                        not hearing                        a response

           and showed       me how               to lock and      unlock                  the safety

                                                     of the                       most tender                   muscle

           that motor                     is               value's                            velocity

                                         is         the            cylinder

                                                                                      of a       sight       aimed

                                                    sold                                                         loaded

                       with      cartographies                       of                          accumulation [...]

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Across the interrelated long-poems of [gamerover], a gun show held at a Phoenix fairgrounds, for instance, traces its origin to the displaying of indigenous Americans at the Columbian Exposition, itself betraying the violence implicit in the fetishization of scientific and technological "progress."  If the latter represented "the coming | of age of | USAmerican | anthropology," its "field-expanding space" suggests those geographical fields appropriated in the name of other American interests.

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For Huapaya, “the landscape is hypertext,” so that ostensibly neutral western cartographies are layered over with those histories of language and culture they occlude.  “The term | vecino,” he writes, “was used | to identify / citizens | who | defended | colonial | settlements / neighbor is | a respectable | member / of the | Arizona | Rifle and | Pistol Association.”  It makes a kind of intellectual sense, therefore, that the long-poem “Scenic Views” features textual maps like those reproduced below, even if those maps inevitably put one in mind of Brown MFA épater la bourgeoisie bullshit.

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Neither is [gamerover] immaculate of the sententiousness of the “radical” with a point to make.  “[S]ome friends | made it out / alive,” Huapaya writes, “from the murder | machine / that | the UNITED STATES / GOVERNMENT TURNED | THE SONORAN / DESERT INTO […].”  “[T]he artist | extended | the diagonal | lines,” Huapaya writes, “to transform | a swastika | into the dollar | sign.”  “[T]he Governor signs | bills,” Huapaya writes, “to force | non-white / non-hetero | bodies | to prove something | to gain access […].”

 

These are shortcuts in idea and implementation which belie the otherwise subtle and sophisticated critique that Huapaya advances throughout [gamerover], a book at its most compelling—and most convincing—when it moves by implication and arrangement.  By the strategic use of abstraction and the passive voice, for instance, or by ironic juxtaposition, Huapaya allows the reader to make connections and anticipate arguments, as when he explains of quasi-legal border patrols that “mounted men | accumulate | and adjust” or that “the bullets | went | toward the | south/west | border.”

 

I had not known about Deep Vellum until I found myself on their reviews e-mail list, but the Dallas-based organization is the largest publisher of literature in translation in the United States, with a strong list in place-based writing like [gamerover].

 

That book is a profound sequence of cultural maps as extensive as they are deep, using Phoenix and its history as an avatar for the ravages of American capitalism.  Through the local, Huapaya goes global, making these poems, as he puts it, “prepositions / of | place” as multi-directional and as provocative as all prepositions.​​​​​