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LA QUEERADOR@ (Performance)
Tamayo’s “Dora ventriloquizes the obscene fantasy formations and the sinister thoughts of the US nation state and its not so invisible corners of the cultural apparatus that would denigrate or fetishize.”
-- Roberto Tejada, in Gulf Coast
YOU DA ONE (2017, 2nd Edition, Noemi Books & Akrilika Series)
"... The “I” in this stunningly original collection is stripped of its singular subjectivity, screen shot into a “contiguous state” of her fluid worlds that compellingly, and luckily, Tamayo shares with us in ours."
--Ronaldo V. Wilson
“By turns violent, political, romantic, incestual, cerebral, bodily, and personal, this second full-length from Tamayo (Red Missed Aches) bears the formal markings of the hypermodern in its deployment of digital, pop, and intertextual elements. Written after her first trip back to her native Colombia in 25 years, the book is indebted to Rihanna, Barthes, and Aimé Césaire, whose texts she mines voraciously. Those influences, as well as the spectres of Alfred Molina and the author's father, haunt the page, intermixed with screen captures, cheap internet advertising, deliberate misspellings, and pun-ridden Spanglish. "I skum magazines, blogs, my favorite books for the parts in which I can see myself," she writes. "Fish for a thing that mirrors cuz the language shimmers at the spot in which it hooks." Amidst full-color photos and text, and images of "click" cursors and avatars, Tamayo concerns herself with her body, her father's body, the bodies of lovers, and the language that connects them despite distance, country, and race: "always in veer, always rounding the corner/ of your other othered on the internet/ there is no refuge in my ENGUUUUUSHH." Tamayo notes a number of live performances of the text, which lends stability to the book on a whole, even as it mirrors the disjointed aesthetics of the internet and contemporary communications.”
[RED MISSED ACHES] (Switchback Book’s Gatewood Prize, 2011)
"Jennifer Tamayo's writing is cacophonous, rude, and stripped. She uses equal measures of English, Spanish, and Spanglish; she landmines her poetry with malapropisms so the music is startling and pleasingly discordant. [Red Missed Aches] feels defiantly unfinished, adhering to DIY feminist punk aesthetic so that it is more rough assemblage than bound book, a palimpsest that provocatively revises female sexuality and citizenship. Tamayo's debut collection is a daring and astonishing work that refuses borders."
--Cathy Park Hong
Jennif(f)er Tamayo (they/them) is a poet, performer and essayist whose works reimagine the narratives about and politics of undocumented figures in the contemporary U.S. In their books, performances, and digital media, the “illegal” immigrant is recast as a punk figure that queers the norms of personhood and citizenship. They are the author of the hybrid poetry collections [Red Missed Aches, Read Mistakes] selected by Cathy Park Hong for the Gatewood Prize and YOU DA ONE (Noemi Books). Their latest chapbook, to kill the future in the present (Green Lantern Press) blends lyric forms and critical theory to explore how conditions of displacement and incarceration shared by Black, Indigenous and undocumented communites are sites for collective struggle. JT’s writing is widely published and has been anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, New Latin@ Writing, and HarperCollins. JT has received fellowships from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Hemispheric Institute’s EmergeNYC, CantoMundo, and the University of California Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. They have staged performances at The Brooklyn Museum, BAMPFA, Midtown Arts & Theatre Center Houston, and La Mama Theatre.
They are a formerly undocumented, univited visitor born on Muisca territory (Bogota, Colombia) currently living on Sapponi territory.
contact information ~ email: jennifertm@gmail.com | instagram: @lxs_revoltosxs