There are many ways to answer this question. After the publication of my previous book of poetry, Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (2015), also with Camino del Sol, I was interested in getting back to a more imbricated lyric politics, beyond that book’s intra-Americanist politics of page as hemisphere. I was also returning to writing in traditional forms such as the sonnet, partly to rethink the performative and experimental, which have defined my work for so long. At the same time, I wanted to continue my walking improvisation poems (“wokitokitekis”) and the poetics of self-translation from Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and some of my earlier work, so I pushed forward on both and thought of the transversal line as a framing device for what I was doing, departing but connecting. A lot of this was about coping, as it tied into a whole process of mourning (the death of my father, the aftermath of Hurricane María) that on the one hand led me back to my native Puerto Rico and on the other made me commit to digging deeper into my writing practice. Paradoxically, this digging deeper manifested itself as two extremes: the formal poems where I could distill this emotional weight through a formal architecture and the improvisational poems where I could cut loose and let my mind (and walking body) wander and go to places my poet’s ego wouldn’t always let me: to be by turns mawkish and brutal, or funny and dark, sometimes in one breath.