Limitless and Incomplete: Notes on Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s MADNESS

photo by the author

Now that I am feeling more involved with this world…I must write as if there are several worlds on top of me…as if I were measuring where I started and stopped. —Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué, Madness

Sometimes I’m afraid that I hate books. That a book is never enough. That there’s inherently something lacking about the book as an art form. If this is true, I’ve got something big and unravel-able to admit: that my adult life has been, if not a lie, then a long, unconvincing excuse for my inattention to so many other essential and pressing ideas.

In the last two years, not only has my reading pace slowed to a crawl, but my patience for so many novels, collections, and memoirs has been sapped (maybe due to the pandemic, but more likely due to my having published my first book late last year). I seem drawn only to a book if it attempts to be three books at once. All the better if it’s half the length of one. My requirement is that a book uses a formally inventive conceptual framework, delivers at least hints of story, and serves as the author’s diary of the book writing process. Why do I need so many layers in order to feel excited enough to finish reading something? Must every book be bespoke? How long can this last? There’s only so much Rachel Cusk, Leanne Shapton, and David Shields out there. Where else can writers go?

The word “Poetry” is printed in the lower left-hand corner of the back cover of Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), the fourth book by poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué. The book is an imagined selected poems by a poet who never existed, who published between the years 1996 and 2032, but who serves also as a kind of autofictional avatar[1] for Ojeda-Sagué. It’s true there’s plenty of poetry here, which lends the book no shortage of lyricism, but I quickly found that Madness reads more like a novel, its pages turning with a speed and excitement I don’t normally associate with a poetry collection. However, the more time I spent with it, mulling and re-reading, I could not help but view the book also as a speculative memoir. It’s that final layer which makes the new waters Madness charts so compelling, unsettling, and endlessly fascinating.

Ojeda-Sagué’s invented not only the poet, Luis Montes-Torres, but also the editors who selected his poems and wrote brief contextual introductions to each book collected. It’s in these editor’s notes where the book’s narrative connective tissue grows. The first five pages are in prose, providing not only the frame for the story, but also its first chapter: the poet Luis Montes-Torres is born in Cuba, and at four he’s taken to Key West on the 1980 mass emigration known as the Mariel Boatlift, separating him from his mother, beginning his poet origin story, which leads to the 1996 micro-press publication of his first book, Hills and Towers. Madness’s next section is a small suite of playful, loose, and lonely poems from that debut. And so Madness is structured: an editor’s note, then ten or so poems. This pattern repeats throughout the eight books in Montes-Torres’s chronology. It’s a brilliant, clever, and pleasing structure—the story delivered in quick bursts, stretched out by interludes of poetry, each suite quite different from the last and variously themed by climate, queerness, an immigrant identity, and mental illness. This way, Madness is a page-turning dark comedy, while also being a quiet series of meditations.

In the opening Editor’s Note/Chapter of Madness, the editors call Montes-Torres “a minor poet…” who though once shortlisted for the country’s biggest book award, “…went almost entirely disregarded…” Half the tiny print-run of Montes-Torres’s first book never left the warehouse at all, and his fourth was book so false and thin they didn’t even include a word of it.

If poets are as unpopular and sentenced to obscurity as the narrator/editors make them out to be, who better to reinvent the novel than this ignored class of aesthetes? Not to say more poets should pivot to ‘Great American Novel’ writing, but rather that when an artist brings poetry’s freedom and elasticity to narrative, there’s so much to be discovered. The poet’s novel should be more than poetry, more than novel. It should open up an entirely new space between poetry and novel, the way autofiction has opened (or at least given suitable terms for) the fertile space between memoir and fiction, which is to say, the space of reality. I guess what I need now is for a book to be real, and Madness is really real[2], thanks in large part to its singularness.

Though everything that obsessed me about this book is in its form and the pages where the text runs flush to right margin, I want to spend some time with the poems which comprise the majority of Madness’s pages (if not its word count). I’m torn about the poems because I believe I’m supposed to be. The narrator/editors are carefully critical, never simply cheerleaders for their favorite, forgotten poet. In fact, Montes-Torres denounces his career’s most lauded publication (The Ocean as it Shouldn’t Be) twenty years after the fact. I wonder too if Ojeda-Sagué isn’t also on the fence about the poems that make up Madness, given that they alone were not enough to tell all the stories he wanted Madness to tell about obscurity, intimacy, immigration, mental health, the climate, a public life in art, and a private life of ideas.

The early poems of Montes-Torres’s career are funny, cerebral, but ultimately low-stakes. The themes which reach across his nearly forty-year publishing career are present here from poem one: water, transportation, ars poetica. “I put a pencil on the river / and draw it a source,” ends the first poem in the book, from his debut.

Montes-Torres’s verse finds new energy in All the Love Bush (2002), love poems that precede by nine years his most successful work. They’re playful, charming, and visually evocative. I fall in love with both Montes-Torres and his new partner Evan Bower as they ‘convert a cactus to a spray’ or do a ‘different dance in the same mirror.’ The poetry is felt, crackling, and dusted with a natural sugar, the kind that’s not so bad for you. These poems endear me to the characters because they show the possibility of the good life: a writer can publish in obscurity, find love, and enjoy observing life as it unfolds. This is what the story-craft manual Save the Cat would call “Fun and Games,” early second act stuff, reveling in play and possibility. All the Love Bush, published thirty years before the poet’s final book, may be the most joyful (on the page, and off) our protagonist gets. It also precipitates a rather long period of literary unproductiveness. And for how many writers is requited love an antidote to output?

Even when his next book, 2011’s The Ocean as It Shouldn’t Be, brings a brush with literary fame, Montes-Torres never finds himself at home or comfortable with it. Ocean tackles the poet’s relationship to his ethnic identity directly, espousing what the narrator/editors call his ‘take on Latindad’. The attention drives him into what appears be at the least a pervasive anxiety but also bouts of mania and depression, and this is evidenced not so much in the cold, direct poems themselves, but rather in the way he snaps back with a follow-up book, Sailing, which Montes-Torres described himself as “a copy of the last one”. Here, the editors/narrator decline to include even a single line from Sailing, and instead provide the reader with Madness’s most moving, memorable section, excerpts from Montes-Torres’ diaries of the eleven-year period between the rightfully maligned Sailing and the esoteric 2024 release, Dictation.

This period of Montes-Torres’ life is shot through with personal, professional, and global anxieties. The diaries are a headrush, giving the reader the most multifaceted and human look at the person Montes-Torres was/is. They feel so real in fact that it’s hard not to wonder if they aren’t excerpts ripped directly from Ojeda-Sagué’s own journals.

“Today saw the best dog. It’s important to be able to tell what is cute in the world. | Yesterday was less good than I thought, now that I am doing today. | Is invention possible? | Today believed I saw my brother in the mirror, but I do not have a brother. | Sailing coming along badly but quickly. Do no know what to write but am writing. Reading in a week in Chicago. | | | Today I am writing on a plane. Thinner thoughts, better poems. | ”

 The format of these pages does so much for the tense, whiplashy, internetty way they read. I love how pipes (“|”) are used to separate days and how a series of pipes (“| | | | |”) denote a period of no-journaling days. These moving, entertaining pages remind me not only of the messiness of my own various journals, but how I always harbor a secret hope that the ‘no-stakes’ writing I do in these private spaces will actually, one day, turn out to be a book on its own, or at least a section of a book, or a section of a fictional character’s book, and so on, always wishing that there is in fact a book my brain is writing somewhere in secret.

The journal pages are laced with quotidian observations (so many dogs), facile but true musings, and then, suddenly, lines that could be the epigraph for any book one could want to write.

At the beach with Evan, I swore the ocean and him were made of the same incredible yarn. | Wish I made more money, but the library and writing is all the stress I can handle. Though I have always been depressed, the last few years have brought me a certain fragility I cannot put my finger on. Fragility not that I will hurt myself, I have never fantasized that, too afraid of dying to do so. Fragile, as in, dedicated to a version of the world that does not hold under pressure. | | I laughed at everything Even said tonight over dinner. We are hiking tomorrow.

Italics mine. That’s exactly how I’ve felt since publishing my first book: fragile. My writer-identity is one that crumbles under pressure. Art in my life has always been a permanent answer to a ceaseless question: what do I care for? What scares me most is that the answer may have been temporary all along, the way a good day followed by a bad one makes the good day seem a little false.

Readers who are writers will love Madness, but they will feel called out, questioned, laughed at/with, and held by these nine pages of journals. It makes me wonder what Ojeda-Sagué could do with eighty pages of days represented in this way.

While the book may sound like a deeply layered, writers’-writer, avant-garde experiment, I’d be delinquent if I didn’t point out how pleasurable the book is to read. It’s funny from page one (“He was a boring fire,” the editors say of Montes-Torres). The humor is often dry and subtle, but when Montes-Torres, during a long publishing hiatus wins a poetry contest to have his quasi-haiku printed on a Frosted Mini-Wheats box, the silliness is welcome, making Montes-Torres even more human while also pointing out the absurd ways poetry and capitalism intersect.

the sight of white
in the morning
is a miracle
Frosted Mini-Wheats

As funny as it is, the book is equally a requiem for earth’s collapsing climate, laying bare how little literature can do—how culturally and socio-politically powerless it is—in the face of catastrophe. Madness’s believable, dreadful future-casting gives the book global weight. Rising, unclean waters and unstoppable fires haunt and dismantle the country in years not far away at all. These traumas figure heavily into Montes-Torres’s later work (Dictation [2024] and Hold Me To It [2028]), which never again resumes the full humor, cleverness, and innocence of the early poems. From a 2024 Montes-Torres blog post reflecting on a pair of massive California fires: “Writing is never made better by this, by devastation, by feeling that one is despicable, by this awfulness in the air. Regardless what they tell you, art is never made better by all this.” And the echo here, the notes not played by still you hear them: neither is the burning world made better by all of this…art.

I’ll return again to form, because that’s the muscle Madness flexes to greatest effect. It shares a lot with a literary device which, in the last decade, has 1) enthralled me to a point of fixation, 2) challenged me to the point of desperation, and 3) annoyed me to death. It’s a form colloquially called (I shudder to even type this) “Hermit Crab” writing, but which I (nearly as annoyingly) insist on calling “Artifact Fiction,” meaning a piece of writing taking the form of another, non-literary form of writing/communication. Think of Julie Schumacher’s novel Dear Committee Members, told entirely in imagined recommendation letters, or Rick Moody’s Hotels of North America, a novel comprised of its protagonist’s Yelp reviews. Madness’s artifact is more Nabokovian, choosing an adjacent literary form (the collected poems) in which to house its own literature.

In 1966, artist Tom Phillips started taking paint to an old forgotten book called A Human Document. His result, A Humument, codified a new literary form, now often called erasure or found poetry. This level of invention tends to stem from the marginalized part of the literary world that treats writers first as artists. It’s this space in which new genres manifest. While Madness doesn’t destroy the book as a form, it does make of it a kind of origami, a book with three dimensions, an art object.

It’s the kind of book David Shields argues for in Reality Hunger. Not to say Ojeda-Sagué has plagiarized anyone (save for maybe himself) because issues of plagiarism and appropriation were only Realty Hunger’s flashy selling point—the call I took away was that we need new forms and genres altogether, or else we need none. Shields (using the words of Patricia Hampl) also points to poetry as a genre more instructive than fiction for fashioning new possibilities. Madness shows that poetry can also be a ripe space for dissolving genre boundaries altogether.

Or, it comes very close. For reasons I understand but still wish could be set aside, the book includes a clunky front-matter insert that reads, “Everything past this point is fiction…the reader will be informed when they can assume truth again.” I resist having my hand held this way when entering and exiting the book’s otherwise finely crafted world. In fact, I’m glad I missed this page upon first read. This gave me the room to read on the third level of memoir.

There’s at least a little nonfiction in every book regardless which word—fiction, poetry, memoir—is printed in the corner of its back cover. Also, there’s always the acknowledgements, the notes, the bio, the headshot (Ojeda-Sagué forgoes that one). What else is a bibliography or index but a log of what the author spent the last X years of their life doing?

I (likely due to my writing-identity-crisis) read Madness as the story of Ojeda-Sagué constructing a natural, believable narrative to explain the vastly different poems (different in style, form, subject matter, use of humor, tone, shape) a poet might write over the course of their life. The books he could have finished. If this is the original impetus for Madness, I would not be surprised. Nor should you be surprised to find that through building this narrative, Ojeda-Sagué has created something much more than a container for so many disparate poetic voices. And if that was in fact an impetus for the book, what writer could blame him for finding such a clever, surprising, and moving solution?

I can barely think about the stories published in my debut collection, which is not even a year old now. I too have burning questions about what my relationship to my writing will be in the years to come, and if my writing will develop relationships with any readers or critics, or if it will change anything about my life or the lives of others. I certainly know it won’t save the planet, but what could my or any writing do if its author not only imagines it but imagines the future it will exist in? In this way, Madness is again speculative, a path charted forward into Ojeda-Sagué’s literary and personal life. In becoming a mid-career poet himself with this book[3], Ojeda-Sagué has cast forward a future he may wish to expel (book as spell warding off), or embrace (book as self-fulfilling prophecy). Probably both at once, as the entire book is an amalgam.

All books are incomplete, and Madness’s narrator will be the first to admit it. But a book, when imagined by the mind of an artist (not a ‘novelist,’ a ‘poet,’ or a ‘memoirist’) is at the same time limitless. It’s why we keep reading, why writers keep writing, why I can’t wait to see the new spaces Ojeda-Sagué will uncover in our future.

[1] A number of the poems published in Madness, which for the sake of the book’s concept were written by the fictional Montes-Torres, were actually published singly in journals prior to Madness’s publication, and in those journal’s the poems are attributed to Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

[2]Many of the other poets, critics, presses, and journals mentioned across the book’s ten editor’s note chapters actually exist (John Weiner, Marjorie Perloff, Burning Deck Press, etc.)

[3] His first to receive a review in the Times