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by Camilo Roldan (Author)
In 1971, Lee Lozano wrote, "IDENTITY CHANGES CONTINUOUSLY AS MULTIPLIED BY TIME. (IDENTITY IS A VECTOR.)" Throughout his first full-length book of poems, poet Camilo Rold n, who has taken the late artist Lozano as a sort of spirit guide, appears to challenge identity to the point of crisis. The poems in Dropout cover seven years of the author's life in New York City. Rold n has since left the US for Colombia, where he has found work as a translator in Bogot . The contrast between cultures and dialects and an increasingly intimate engagement with intertextuality and the diverse contingencies of language may have given him the perspective to look back across a relatively short time span to compose this extraordinary book. Dropout is distinctly the work of a bilingual writer intent on foregrounding intertextual relationships as a kind of interlingual liminality. A preoccupation with translation as authorship, and conversely, authorship as translation, wends its way through mistranslations, ekphrasis, mixtures of English and Spanish, collage poems, citations, glosses and the ephemeral tracings of a reader's identity vector.
