Small Sargassum Mountains/Pequenas montanas de sargazo

A multilingual collection of prose poems, anchored by the structure of the spiral—literal, linguistic, cosmic. Starting with sargassum, a species of algae found on the ocean’s surface, and spiraling outwards Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeñas montañas de sargazo assembles language, memory, and matter in a current where the borders between poetry and prose, reading and writing, Spanish and English, experience and memory are eroded like a shoreline. Bringing together childhood memories, folklore, and contemporary world events, Antonio Ochoa seeks to erase boundaries between time and space as well as linguistic and cultural codes in an “oscillation between hemispheres.” The result is a piece of profound personal and aesthetic ambition, one whose modes—diaristic, poetic, philosophical—recall those of Frankétienne, W. G. Sebald, and Édouard Glissant.