Music, and the musicality of language in particular, are really important to me and to my sense of what poetry is and does. Poetry does not need to be super rhythmic (it does not need to be anything in particular) but my sense of the musicality of language is tied to how words are haunted by other words and worlds, by wordless sounds, bodies, silences. I have different influences as a performer, from the Puerto Rican décima tradition I grew up with to that of the Nuyorican poets, which I claim and write about in my critical work. I have also worked with bands and more recently incorporated phone apps into my performances: sometimes to create sound textures or loops but other times to create deliberate mistranslations, to generate found poems (anagrams, for instance), or to introduce multiple voices into my work and to complicate the immediacy of the relationship between performer and audience. As a poet and critic, I’m very interested in mediated performance, in how it shapes the politics of empire (as in the previous president) but can also sometimes unsettle them, in how the hyper-mediation and gadget-ification of everything is both a challenge and an opportunity for poetry. Poems for Transversal evolved as I performed them everywhere from the Poesiefestival Berlin and the Toronto Biennial of Art to colleges and community gardens in the South Bronx. I think of these performances as extending the sedimentation of the poems, their symbiotic relationships to the environments that birthed them. In our pandemic context, I have explored different approaches to digital performance that highlight but also push against the screened-ness of our present, whether by highlighting the space between my body and the screen, using my phone and computer simultaneously to create more weirdly stereophonic performances, or reclaiming analog forms such as the postcard. I have also done “live” wokitokiteki improvisations in my backyard over Zoom. Increasingly, all my longer readings and performances include at least a brief component of improvisation, and I anticipate that I will continue doing so for Transversal, partly to underscore that what’s in a book is not the end but just another beginning.