Play for Time

Selected by Vijay Seshadri as the winner of the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

"Unimpeachable . . . round and rich and exfoliating with intuition, hesitation, self-questionings, and personhood." -Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, 3 Sections

"If you were made to speak a language you labored to make yours, I wrote it for you. If you wished you could unwrite, rewrite, or write in stone or water any number of lifetimes you've endured, I wrote it for you. If you felt that the only home you've known was inside words; if you have written the names of lovers on pieces of paper and burned them in spells; if you understand which words hurt and which heal; if you've begged for more and for mercy, I wrote it for you."

In her blistering debut, Paula Mendoza wields the weapon of language as she dismantles the longstanding traditions of the colonial narrative, male speech, and the sentimental love poem. Taking on the forms of historically polarizing figures-the witch, the femme-dom, Eve-the speaker of her poems is both submissive object and powerful agent that wills herself caught between pirate and plunder, that rewrites linguistic scripts to survive oppression, that self-immolates into a state of rebirth, that asks what use or meaning can be made of brokenness and displacement.

Playful and deliberate, innovative and strange, Play for Time, Mendoza's debut collection of experimental lyric poems demolishes the literary commonplaces of "universality" and provides a timely introduction to an explosively original voice in poetry.