Alternative Set of Procedures

— Asked if the voice has forbidden her to answer / everything she was asked, she said: “I will not answer you that.”

Soto-Román works between documentary, lyric, and concrete poetry in an exploration of state-managed violence. The poems reproduce the horror of bureaucratic manuals detailing torture protocols, which often included the short- and long-term trauma that is the desired outcome. Against this horror, the poems index the spirit and force of refusal, survival, and autonomy — that which can never be contained, nor destroyed. The pamphlet continues Soto-Román’s longstanding practice of examining, with absolute clarity and conviction, the violence of statecraft and the fugitivity of poetry.