Pause the Document

“In Mónica de la Torre’s hands, opacity is all etymology. . . In these Wordsworthian poems, the speaker, distressed by the social order, turns, intrigued, to trees: their properties, lives, language, and entanglements. Rebounding their kaleidoscopic thinking and consciousness off the surfaces and textures of the landscape, the brilliant poems of Pause the Document remind us how we can “unfold as a flow” inside language and life.”
—Claudia Rankine

“What’s a pathogen when humans have “a tendency to ruin things” with language? In this bio-political linguistic dead reckoning, de la Torre’s magisterial re-versioning of an infected language system re-scrambles itself into a linguistic hammering, like a pause or a dream, the language that’s been playing us all along.”
—Tan Lin

"[Pause the Document] memorializes the years during which it was written, insofar as it demonstrates how socio-political ruptures so quickly remind us of the fragile ground upon which systems of logic and meaning rest. . . a great book about impermanence, trees, the pathways of stars, cabin fever, pre-linguistic infants and healing."
—Marko Gluhaich, Frieze

“Mónica de la Torre’s majestic “password in gift form,” unlocks unrestricted access to what it means to love and to be loved within impermanence and loss. Amidst the sentient, kaleidoscopic intimacy of her writing, “the pathology of our entanglement” gets mapped onto everything. Pause the Document is our sensate dowsing branch detecting all frequencies of where language can lead us.”
—Kim Rosenfield  

“Pause the Document functions as poem, prose, and riddle. Everyday incidents tilt into paradigms and elegies for existence. Reading this studied yet humorous and deftly crafted book is like hanging out with a friend—many turns and returns to cherish.”
—Moriah Evans

“In this defiantly anti-documentary poetics, de la Torre’s “counter-texts” score “how the poem’s aboutness became its burden” and tease out new ecologies of meaning. Pause the Document argues for an “erotics of intermittence,” a new temporal embodied geography where the self and language are also built environments and where we embrace poetry as a beautifully burning archive, a confusion of excess, renewal, and ruin.”
—Urayoán Noel  

"If future alien civilizations might seek to understand how we lived, or at least tried to, one might hope they could find their way to these poems. . . exploratory, declarative, engaged and curious; shifting prose blocks to line breaks, a variation on rhythms, propulsion, offering exploratory statements on human language and being."
—rob mclennan, periodicities