JAWS [tiburón]
Sunday, October 4
Doors: 7pm
Reading: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts+Archives
∆
The Poetic Research Bureau hosts the Los Angeles book launch of JAWS [tiburón] by Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza, published by Cardboard House Press. With translators Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier, and co-readers isaac dwyer and Julián Delacruz.
∆
JAWS [tiburón] by Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza, translated from the Spanish by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier. “Something in my name turns me into a fish under attack,” says Jaws: shark, worker, spectacle. This award-winning poetry collection collapses the distance between sea and office, aquarium and classroom, factory and vacation resort, resumé and body under attack. JAWS is a book about water, breath, and suffocation, about work that disciplines the body, about survival under glass. Through (mis)translation, documentary fragments, and cinematic archive, these poems reveal how capital renders certain lives expendable, human and non-human alike. Fierce, darkly funny, and formally restless, JAWS insists on the shark not as monster, but as mirror... swimming, working, alive and curious about where meaning breaks down across languages, worlds, and personas... and what lurks in the waters between.
∆
Mexican-Canadian poet and translator Dora Prieto writes from Ohlone land (Oakland, CA), where she is a 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with House of Anansi (April 2027), and she is a member of El Mashup Collective, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary artistic experiments. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Best New Poets 2025, Catapult, Hazlitt, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, and elsewhere. She won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. She is an auntie, a dreamer, a thinker, and a cold ocean swimmer—despite a close encounter with a shark as a kid. ♡☆ @primadora_
Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico ✿ city of eternal Spring ✿ and raised in el Distrito Federal, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier writes and translates from unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Volume and carte blanche. She is part of eclectic artist collectives mim and El Mashup, a programmer at the Vancouver Latin American Film Fest, and co-host of Vivaporú on CiTR 101.9FM. Foodie who shelves books and binds them too. Ocean child. She has felt the presence of a shark stirring nearby waters. Dani has two feisty gorgeous dachshunds, Xoco and Rol. @la.tacodelic
isaac dwyer is a poet, translator, and doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UCLA. They work in Spanish, Portuguese, Urdu-Hindi, Farsi, and Tajiki. Recent writings, translated and otherwise, have appeared in Erotic Review, Asymptote, Foglifter, Gutter, The Journal of Gender Studies, and elsewhere.
Julián Delacruz (he/him) is a medium who writes poems at the border of seance and madness. He received his MFA from Arizona State University and lives and teaches in Los Angeles, where he is working on his first collection. His work has appeared in The Lambda Literary Spotlight, The Bennington Review, & Change, APROSEXIA, and Rejected Lit.