"Doesn't a book reach its climax the moment its author turns around and sees us, its equilibrium the moment they disappear into seeing us? 'I want to be the hormone of darkness / I want to see, ' Tilsa Otta declares, passionately, into Farid Matuk's compassionate ear. This hormone is pulling me, at last, out of a darkness and towards an optimism I thought long since burned out. Not by turning away from the horror vacui of life but by looking more intently and lovingly into and through it. La oscuridad is a brand-new lightning-old slow-motion perreo play everlasting planetarium tattooed on the body of the angel of intimate futurity." --Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall
"Tilsa Otta's poems move like light through the body. You have made contact with someone completely unafraid of living. Sort of shocking yet uninterested in causing you pain, these lines can't help but delight you--by eluding you--like children or some dazzling technological innovation. This is also how they make you grow. What if light itself were a child? Do you dread your own ecstasy? Light shines where it doesn't. The sun hovers within you, dangerously--like a rumor. Do you believe you know yourself?
The Hormone of Darkness charts a new thermodynamics--or maybe just the same old one we won't stop misprizing. "God" is an insomniac measuring device, an insane and miserable man--the corollary of global disenchantment--or just another hilarious error of the mind. But it's like the law says: nothing can ever be destroyed. Only changed. You should change. So should I. In any case, we already are."
--Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book "
The Hormone of Darkness is a playlist curated con amor, cariño, and a feral proclivity for the ecstatic activation of queer mutant futures. Tilsa Otta's poems beckon us into a nightclub of liberatory living, reminding us that ' La poesía es todas las fiestas.' Matuk's translations offer a lucid refraction that encompasses the writhing, vibrantly liminal spectrum of Otta's tender, playful, and urgent work. This book demands you shake your tail toward dreams and desires 'until the words break down.'"
--Angel Dominguez, author of Desgraciado (the collected letters) "This is a sensual and sumptuous corp de text, a fragmented reality in which, one day a week, the color blue takes a break so other colors may have a chance to be the sky. With his familiar elegance and deft translation, Matuk captures and distills Otta's fragrance into English, bringing us into the exosphere from which she gazes."
--Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, author of The Easy Body 
