'Nerve Curriculum' Featured by The Latinx Project NYU: ‘La Treintena’ 2023

Manuel Paul Lopez's ‘Nerve Curriculum’ (Futurepoem 2023) was recently featured in The Latinx Project's “La Treintena 2023” — where Urayoán Noel highlights 30 (Something) Books of Latinx Poetry that have been making a splash this year:

This book begins with a burst of translingual noise (echoing PJ Harvey) and from there flows into a fragmentary écriture that has something of the rigor and clarity of the conceptual, not afraid of repetition or abstraction. Whereas some of Lopez’s other work has more transparently evoked the San Diego and Imperial Valley borderlands he is rooted in, here the memory of youth and the constitution of selfhood are fascinatingly worked through the speaker’s cousin/neighbor/alter ego, the “Chicano goth” Nestor. Along the way, the book pings with references to everyone from Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to John Yau, Kenneth Koch, José Olivarez, Jack Hirschman, and Zora Neale Hurston, and to the alternative curricula of Wikipedia and YouTube. Don’t miss the beautiful abjection of “Bird Brain,” the last couplet of which contains its own kind of wisdom: “Of all the rain falling on this planet I’ve somehow attracted / the neon spacey kind that governs like a syllabus of smoke."