I, the Worst of All is a complex and heterogeneous book that combines Lamat's intense, almost manic lyricism with her prodigious mythopoeic imagination. The result is a challenging and ambitious project that invites multiple readings and rewards extended lingerings within its dense, linguistic thicket…This book quite literally takes your breath away–because of the demanding pace of Lamat's language (" language pours from me from every / pore ," she says in the book's opening invocation) and because of the hyperbolic ferocity of her tropes: "my eyes see / my forehead sees / and my fingers see / as if I were a huge uterus bombing clairvoyant sons." This is a vatic poetry that bombards the reader with bizarre visions that are as beautiful as they are terrifying.

“Estela Lamat delivers us the second volume of her trilogy, a brilliantly decisive book with all the distortions that contemporary poetry allows and demands from its readers. I, the Worst of All is a lucidly difficult, serenely dreadful, and incomparably obsessive text, but for this very reason, this illuminating catastrophe is a work that will bolster…[a] new generation of young Latin American poets.”

—Héctor Hernández Montecinos

 

Estela Lamat was born twice: first, ushered in by the impact of a bullet and, second, at age eight under a three-legged table.  She is also the author of Sangre Seca (2005) and the forthcoming Colmillo Molido.
 
Michael Leong has published poems, reviews, and translations in journals such as Bird Dog , Double Room , GutCult , jubilat , Opium Magazine , and Tin House .  His debut poetry collection entitled e.s.p . is forthcoming from Silenced Press. 

Listen to a podcast of Estela Lamat and Michael Leong reading here