[gamerover]

“What position does one play in the long-running game of who belongs and who does not? The Latin American poet-immigrant in this book, his avatar, at first doesn’t know. But when a rock is thrown at him as he walks down a street in the Southwest, he begins to understand that there is a long trajectory to be mapped between the arm holding the rock and his own body, a counter-map that reveals a history of violence, erasure, and white supremacy. One can also create a new game and assemble the players, bringing together poets and their words to respond to these histories and hostilities, ‘with the frequency of those deported,’ to reveal ‘a chain of griefs.’ Giancarlo Huapaya’s [gamerover], in this skillful translation by Ryan Greene, is the hope I need now: that collectively, through art, we can see more clearly and enact change.”—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU

“Giancarlo Huapaya navigates the fluidity of a lyricism that becomes static when it ignores arrests, shackles, cages, zoos, world fairs, circuses and other panopticons where death is replicated, and colonial epistemes are reproduced. In its pages, goods and languages circulate, displacing a body marked by migrant becoming. In any phrase, [gamerover] lies in wait. At any turn, poetry responds by opening fine cracks, through which the possibility of another world may enter. In this new bilingual edition, translated by Ryan Greene, languages spiral beyond the feedback loop we call survival.”—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary

“[gamerover]—Games are over. Game rover. And all the permutations that twist and scale and scream and bend. This is explosive poetry, and somehow Giancarlo Huapaya has found a form for the explosivity and too-muchness of caged-up children, chained-up migrants, and white supremacist massacres. [gamerover] presents an archive of voices and epistemologies that build and define and synthesize and detonate and move us, forcefully and brilliantly, through historical kidnappings and present-day disappearances. This is a vital and necessary book, for how it’s written, for its sense of urgency and critique, and for its focused awareness of what it means to make art—an optimistic and vibrant art—amid the rotten folds of empire, hatred, and capital. Ryan Greene’s work as a translator these past few years has been daring, incisive and important, and this continues to be true here. I am energized and awed by Greene and Huapaya’s translational collaboration, and thankful for these two extraordinary artists who escort us through this hypnotic, arresting, game.”—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

Giancarlo Huapaya (born in Lima, Peru) is an editor, writer, curator, and educational facilitator. He is the Editorial Director of Cardboard House Press, a project dedicated to the publication of Latin American literature in translation to English and the creation of bilingual spaces in the United States. As a curator of poetics, he has presented exhibitions at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As literary translator, he has translated into Spanish work by Muriel Rukeyser, C.D Wright, Susan Briante, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Zedan Xelef, among others.

Ryan Greene is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He’s a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include collections of poetry by Claudina Domingo, Elena Salamanca, Ana Belen Lpez, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has co-facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore.