Angel Dominguez + Ariel Resnikoff: Video Conversation
A conversation between poets Angel Dominguez and Ariel Resnikoff about their books RoseSunWater and Unnatural Bird Migrator, both published by Operating System in 2020. Some topics discussed include: translingual texts, diasporic writing, ancient futurity, writing between the living and the dead, purity and impurity, poetry and nourishment, and language that doesn't long to build an empire.
Unnatural Bird Migrator stitches together disparate filaments of diasporic language as a living quilt of translational refuse, a patchwork-art gleaned and assembled from the pieces of writing and speech we are quite literally taught to forget. ‘UNBM’ traverses the semi-permeable borders between doubling and tripling mother tongues in exile, looping these languages through one another and back again in the form of a highly adaptive poetic boomerang that returns from the “other side” of the linguistic threshold already changed.
RoseSunWater is a collection of bioluminescent writing that seeks to keep memory alive in the face of colonial gentrification of the city, the peninsula, and the mind. The writing contained seeks to render the spillage of the spirit through ancestral retracings from Los Angeles to the Yucatán, from the orchard to the cenote and back to the sea. RSW is an attempt to finish a poem that Angel’s grandmother wrote, sleep-walking through time and space in search of the recuperation of ancestry, dreams, and a sense of home.
Angel Dominguez
Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They’re the author of ROSESUNWATER (The Operating System, 2021) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light 2015). Angel earned a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean. Their third book, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters) came out with Nightboat Books in 2022.
