The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist

A bilingual selection of tender, transgressive poems by a Peruvian poet and multimedia artist

In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die.

Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and trans-dimensional wandering among the stars.