Copy

Dorantes certainly pushed boundaries in her journalism, and she does so in her new book. Though it rightly bears the words “translated by Robin Myers” on the cover and title page, Copy is, in the fullest sense, a collaboration. Between the covers, the two poets together explore profound questions of identity, which play out in the act of copying themselves, always with the proviso “copiously.”
Paul Vangelisti, LARB

The writing is elusive and inconclusive, provocative, even brutal. More than anything, it’s enigmatic: Is the above a liberatory invitation? A demanding ultimatum? A delusional mandate? Ultimately, the text asks us to buzz in this ambiguity, in its relentless interrogation of identity and self.
Diego Baez, Harriet Books, Poetry Foundation

I like to think of the poems and their fractured sentences as evidences of memory and its various permutations, true to Dorantes’ fixation with replications and semblances. Copy seems like a study of memory’s assembly, its deconstruction and shattering, its reconstruction—based on fragments, sounds, smells, faint and blurry images. This reconstruction, however, is perhaps better defined as the betrayal of memory, an anti-memory. The recollections encapsuled in Copy are but assumptions, notions, hunches, so vague and shapeless and indiscernible as to be unrecognizable. Instead of an answer, Copy’s images and scenes are questions.
José Garcia Escobar, Asymptote