As I mentioned, Transversal was meant to be a Caribbean book. It’s ethos and concept are Glissantian, right down to the striking cover image by the artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, who is a great reader of Glissant. The book grew out of my return to the Caribbean, not only Puerto Rico, but also the Dominican Republic, where one of the earliest poems in the book is set, and Cuba, where I began the first draft of what would become the long poem “Periodo Espacial Spatial Period.” While some poems in the second section are ten or even 15 years years old, the book was conceived and largely written after my move to a waterfront area of the South Bronx in late 2016. Much of the improvisational poetry comes from walking along or around nearby Randalls Island Park, recording myself on video as I improvise, and then transcribing the improvisations with no editing. I noticed that after a while the islands of the Caribbean would blend with Randalls Island and Manhattan in my improvisations, all one sedimented archipelago poetics. This seemed like coming full circle, since the first of these wokitokiteki video improvisations were done while walking on a beach in Puerto Rico in early 2012. Before that, I was doing voice notes transcriptions only, since that’s what my phone at the time could handle: the poem “Unstatements,” composed while I was living and teaching in Albany, New York, is one of these early, voice-only improvisations. At some point, the poetics of statelessness (a word I play around with a lot and that resonates as a Puerto Rican) and the poetics of (un)statement just began to blur, and I went with it, letting poems become voice and movement exercises, become political or theoretical statements or meditations on the state of things (or “no state” of things, to echo the poet Victor Hernández Cruz). As a poet who plays with language a lot, I value how these durational language and walking exercises (a typical wokitokiteki is between 15 and 35 minutes with no pauses in the recording) allow for language to exhaust itself and something else to happen: a stutter, a confession, or just silence and listening to my surroundings, which generates observations or reactions that keep the exercise going. I have even applied this compositional method to conventional poems in the book, such as “Soverano,” written after I participated in the summer 2019 protests in Puerto Rico. A few days after attending the protests I was at the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio studying creative nonfiction, and I wanted a more nonfictional and less conventionally poetic way to tell the story of what I saw at the protests, so I walked around my room and improvised, then transcribed and edited and added as minimally as possible. The result was “Soverano,” something like a prose poem but hopefully conveying a bit of the rawness of the experience of what I saw and felt at the event as I processed it a few days later.