[gamerover]

By Giancarlo Huapaya
Translated by Ryan Greene

A political, poetic excavation of the human landscape, charting the history of geography through the historic movement of its residents' bodies and complicated habits.

Publication Date: May 13, 2025

Paperback: 9781646053759
eBook: 9781646053889

Description

Through intertextual intervention, this anti-linear collection reconceives the archives of Phoenix, Arizona to create a counter-map of the city and its trajectories of supremacist violence. [gamerover] tracks trajectories of colonial enterprises, from the Arizona State Fair to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the Tornillo Detention Center in Texas, investigating the oppressions of each imperial form in spaces of recreation, exhibition, and spectacle.

Understanding the landscape as an ever-moving hypertext, these poems challenge entrenched means of representation, uses of public space, and positions of witness.

Biographical Information

Giancarlo Huapaya (born in Lima, Peru) is an editor, writer, curator, and educational facilitator. He is the Editorial Director of Cardboard House Press, a project dedicated to the publication of Latin American literature in translation to English and the creation of bilingual spaces in the United States. As a curator of poetics, he has presented exhibitions at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As literary translator, he has translated into Spanish work by Muriel Rukeyser, C.D Wright, Susan Briante, Carmen Giménez Smith, Zêdan Xelef, among others.

Ryan Greene is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He's a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include collections of poetry by Claudina Domingo, Elena Salamanca, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has co-facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore.

Reviews

“What position does one play in the long-running game of who belongs and who does not? The Latin American poet-immigrant in this book, his avatar, at first doesn’t know. But when a rock is thrown at him as he walks down a street in the Southwest, he begins to understand that there is a long trajectory to be mapped between the arm holding the rock and his own body, a counter-map that reveals a history of violence, erasure, and white supremacy. One can also create a new game and assemble the players, bringing together poets and their words to respond to these histories and hostilities, ‘with the frequency of those deported,’ to reveal ‘a chain of griefs.’ Giancarlo Huapaya’s [gameover], in this skillful translation by Ryan Greene, is the hope I need now: that collectively, through art, we can see more clearly and enact change.” —Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU

“[gamerover] by Giancarlo Huapaya is a writing space as well as a territory where words move like waves of dust. A documentary and relational poetics that goes between the still point and the mobile to reveal the accumulations of the forces of the colonizing enterprise and the regulations of the landscape to establish ways of perceiving. Huapaya countermaps in poetry a neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona, where the state fair, arms fairs and an industrial area where oil is processed and concrete is manufactured coexist. [gamerover] puts the history, language and landscape of the place in tension to reveal trajectories of violence and white supremacy and to document what is said to be vacant, the place of disappearance and the ways in which the technology of erasure operates.” —Album del Universo Bakterial

“If his first book, Polisexual (2007), questioned the foundations of masculinity in favor of a journey through the underground chambers of non-normative desire, and the second, Taller subverso (2011), constituted a sharp upheaval of language and its transversal possibilities of representation - political, sexual, cultural -, his new work, [gamerover] , stands out for its greater ambition, and at the same time, for landing its proposal in a more delimited demarcation: the state of Arizona, or rather, an Arizona of perceptions: a hostile place where migratory discrimination, the unleashed violence of firearms and the rejection of all differences contaminate human relations and even the contemplative solitude of the poetic speaker, who makes of solidarity pain a prismatic document of denunciation (...) [T]he symbols placed and the juxtaposition of different discourses - journalistic, informative and essayistic - serve as propitious support to set these in motion “poems-panoramas nourished by diverse characters, recognizable locations and historical references assembled with skill and a clear direction that allows the author to sustain his accusatory voice through the gloomy expanses of a country that the poem reconstructs, assuming itself as an intimate and collective cartography.” —José Carlos Yrigoyen, El Comercio

“Huapaya seems submerged in an arsenal of data that consecrate him as a peripheral witness of a reality that strikes on different fronts and diverse subjectivities. Moreover, the construction of verses and textual sequences, refer to that fracturing of the method used in concrete music, of montage, or assembly. [gamerover] is a radical proposal, from a militant of humanity who uses his creeds with creativity and belligerence, with method, security and commitment.” —José Carlos Picón, Círculo de Lectores

“[gamerover] embarks on an investigation in what is now Phoenix, Arizona, into territorial expansion, settler colonialism, militarization, white supremacy, recreation, and the creation of the ‘sportsman’ market, which become the most recent iterative colonial projects (...) Considering cartography as a means to visualize territory according to a framework of interests, the map becomes a fixed point and reproduces its interests across that territory. Through a visual performance, the page is taken as an avatar of geographic space. Huapaya develops a series of maps that draw on sources ranging from historical maps of corporations that determined racial segregation by neighborhood, to contemporary satellite images, to popular culture sources, and records of the trajectory of her own body (...) In tracing human caging, from World's Fair exhibits to the incarceration of migrants under border bridges in El Paso and of children in Tornillo, [gamerover] traces trajectories whose extensions continue to unfold.” —Honora Spicer, Quehacer Magazine

“...the book talks about the paths of exile, whether within a territory or outside of it, to another country. It talks about that feeling of being disoriented, like the permanent misplacement in which the Palestinian writer Edward Said lived: not only because of the physical and geographical displacement, but above all psychological and cultural. That feeling of not belonging to a certain place, sometimes not even to a language completely. Not even to a specific point on the map but to a transitory territory (...) This physical and emotional dislocation leads Huapaya to carry out a counter-mapping and, in this sense, [gamerover] is an act of resistance and denunciation. Thus, the starting and reference points in the text are enriched by the polyphonic voices of the first-person narrator, the headlines in capital letters and the intertexts rigorously cited in the index of notes (...) The intertexts in italics inserted in the poems are translations and/or versions adapted by Huapaya from English to Spanish of different literary genres. The editing work is impeccable because it manages to “adapt the text to the flow and syntax of the poem.” The poet integrates them smoothly into his personal discourse and they function as avatars incorporated into his own voice.” —Raúl Soto, Revista Poesía

“The reading of the splendid verses and stanzas fragmented in a sort of supraprojective verse makes us fall through each poem, and reappear in the next one to fall again, like the steel pinball. It is the chronicle of a season in the hell of the industrial and violent south of the United States, felt from the perspective of the migrant.” —Mirko Lauer, La República