Writing with Caca

Luis Felipe Fabre's WRITING WITH CACA essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. The book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan's HD Book, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon's Rimbaud the Son, Fabre's WRITING WITH CACA is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer.

A page-turner biography of the poet and writer Salvador Novo whose queer shoulder pushed every wall open. In here is Novo's deviant knowledge of what the shit and anus reveal of life, yet resists is sublimation. This book is not for the timid, or maybe it is precisely for them!--CAConrad

Luis Felipe Fabre, one of the most exciting and virtuosic Mexican poets of his generation, knows a lot of good shit. He knows a lot about Salvador Novo, the scatalogical Mexican poet of the early 20th century who, according to Octavio Paz, wrote 'not with blood but with caca.' This terrific book (translated with acrobatic brilliance by John Pluecker), is a work of literary history, literary criticism, poetry, and excretory theory that travels from the Aztecs to Sor Juana to the Mexican Revolution and to contemporary times. Fabre makes a compelling argument for the importance of Novo's writing with caca, and for the importance of celebrating writers who are driven by the 'urge to take a crap on all universal literature.'--Daniel Borzutzky

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction.