Transistor - poetry by Esteban Oloarte

Publication Date: July 15, 2021

Paperback, 80 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-90-8

The transistor, a tiny device capable of amplification and control, is the foundation of our digital world. Now comes “Transistor, who is sage, / and who is never seen despite the live feed”, to conduct us on a breathtaking journey through that world, in this audacious first full-length collection from Esteban Oloarte. “Transistor broadcasts traffic reports, / powers of suggestion, chances of allegory, / and everyone exits in headsets as exiles.” To read this book is to join that parade of exiles, to hitch a ride on an electron, flashing through the circuitry of modern life. Written in the shape of a bible, it is part prophesy, part wisdom literature, part jeremiad, with a bit of “Song of Solomon” eroticism for good measure, a secular sacred and profane text of social and cultural criticism. A set of “footnotes” run throughout the book like a plainsong chant, offering contrapuntal perspective from philosophers, academics, artists, and critics. More than anything, this is a celebration of the pure incantatory power of words, from a poet mad-drunk on language, a modern-day Delphic oracle. This is new, this is news, this is poetry like you haven’t read before, and won’t soon forget.

Praise for Esteban Oloarte & Transistor

Transistor is a transition, a communication, a sending; it is the cool and sacred bond of everything that unites and uplifts us, but it is also the cause of an underlying and persistent dissent that remains between us and who we thought we were. Transistor veins out from body to body, city to city, each human act. As the new time is experienced as one of closure, a historical circle, Transistor recycles the biblical in format, semi-prophetic also occasionally in content, and attempts to extend itself into the everywhere and nowhere the new time has (s)placed us into. Transistor is cold, it is hungry, temptuous, perverted; seriously unserious and unforgiveably there, and it is now.

—Luis Villarreal Escandon

Williams Carlos Williams said it is hard to get the news from poetry. Is it as hard to get poetry from the news? Neither are true and both are correct. But sometimes it happens that, a poet comes along who brings us the news, in the manner of newness, through poetry. So that you get the news in poetry when the poetry is new, when it is written for now but also projected into a potentiality-of-being the phenomenologists discussed. Sometimes it happens that, a poet comes along who delivers the same everydayness the newspapers do, but with that playful touch of irony and analysis of reality we look for in the everyman’s poet. Esteban Oloarte is that poet, a newcomer, bringing the news, newness into the craft. He is that modern Diogenes in the public square, accosting us with his studies in pseudology, simulations; and he does it all from inside the wine-barrel, dancing.

—David Ortega de las Casas, President, Philosophy Association of Mexico

Esteban Oloarte is a Mexican-American poet. He grew up in a trilingual household, having lived in all three North-American countries. His chapbook, Transitions, was shortlisted for The 2020 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest, and his poems have appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Transistor is his first book. He currently lives in Mexico City but, like David Lee Roth, can’t wait to get back to the States.