I have always been really interested in the translatability of poetic form. One thing that happened between the previous book and Transversal is that I started getting more seriously into literary translation: publishing it, writing about it, judging it. I learned a lot from translating everything from the vanguardist 1920s sonnets of Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha to the 1970s concrete poems of Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay, written under the shadow of dictatorship, and the contemporary translingual work of Guatemalan Garifuna poet Wingston González. In all three cases, I made the innovative form of the originals central to my translation, often translating for form as much as for content, and it emboldened me even more to self-translate with an eye and ear for form, honoring the distinct properties and architectures of each form, whether an English ode, a villanelle, a concrete poem, or a free-form improvisation. There are also quieter, untranslated poems, which I wanted in order for the book to have room to breathe. Then there’s the contrasting fonts for the English and Spanish, which I had played around with in Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico but is done a bit more subtly here, as if to insist less on the theatricality of it all. There’s always a lot of performance in my work, but as I’ve gotten used to self-translating (both ways and across forms) I’m less interested in having it be a statement of some kind and just content to let it be, something a poet like Salas Rivera does beautifully. By doing so, I also want to rethink the experimental as a way to center the reader: the experiment not as intent but as relation, where I figure it out for the page and you, the reader, refigure and configure on your terms. There’s one poem in the book that is all homographs (words that look the same but may mean different things in both languages): it’s actually multiple poems depending on how the reader reads. There’s a fair amount in the book that can work in modular fashion: readers can rearrange stuff to fit their layout.