Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta croons in the voice of a lovesick teenaged folklorist time traveler about revolution, housework, anti-colonialism, folk tales, post-punk, anti-fascism, anorexia, and alcoholism. Named both for the Chicana feminist concepts of revolutionary maneuvers and submerged technologies of struggle and the explosive queer punk movement that emerged in Spain during its transition from Franquist Fascism to democracy, La Movida moves from bed to street to river, defending memory and falling in love along the way.
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“Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida is an ecstatic shriek, a horror-feminist wail-song bellowing from a dark pit, where the ones covered in lucent blood vibrate with the eros of insurrection. Witchy, unapologetic, mythic—these incandescent poems avow, with a queer punk irreverence, the dismembering force of desire and the revolutionary potential of anti-colonial vengeance. Let yourself be cut by Luboviski-Acosta’s razor-sharp verse.”
– Jackie Wang
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“There is an easy voice here both guileless and full of guile, sometimes full of adult world-weariness sometimes as naïve as a child, then looking at its own naïeveté and laughing, and showing us its wounds, a little proudly, a little insouciantly. La Movida is romantic, filled with love and longing and friendship and revolution. It is also Romantic in the old sense of the poetic tradition. Here is a poet who is willing—even desirous—to be torn apart for a glimpse of Beauty.”
– Julian Talamantez Brolaski
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“Both raw & elegant, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s La Movida embraces the vulnerability of the individual who finds strength in collective struggle. Whether driven by ‘desire, or / the agonizing pleasure / of self-torture,’ here, they exist ‘in complicated love.’ Here, they know no ‘better / way to deal with a broken / heart than a riot.’ Here, ‘virgo could be / [their] gender, or / it could be [their] sexuality.’ Among marigolds, razors, crystal balls and natal charts, Luboviski-Acosta recovers the potency of the wail of La Llorona, a ‘wail [that] will drown you, too.’”
– Wendy Trevino
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“Reading the work of Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is a direct and distinct pleasure. At once soft and jarring, their words confidently voice a keen level of observation, and quiet power. La Movida walks a morbid path through fields of corporeal indulgence, introspection and repulsion—submission and protest. Sometimes gentle, sometimes bloody. One is crushed and sustained by the weight of these careful, assertive pieces.”
– Liz Harris