Cenex, the central figure of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s Algarabía, is a trans being moving through a parallel world in search of a name, body and home. That premise might sound like escape from Puerto Rico’s material history. The Graywolf Press edition makes the opposite wager: its world has altered versions of Puerto Rican places, and its two original texts use Puerto Rican Spanish and a deliberately changed English. Language is part of the world being built, rather than an invisible carrier of a story invented elsewhere.
The book calls itself an epic. That word usually promises a hero’s route, trials and a destination recognizable as return. Here the search for a name unsettles the idea that the protagonist knows in advance what home will be. A trans character’s movement does not need to stand for every Puerto Rican displacement; the poem can hold a particular bodily and linguistic predicament while engaging a wider history of colonial naming. The speculative form permits the island to reappear under altered rules without claiming that those rules are imaginary in their consequences.
The Hopkins Review conversation with Salas Rivera makes the double-language design legible. The interview itself appears in English and Spanish and discusses how places return in the poem with changed meanings. Graywolf identifies the edition as containing two original texts, not merely a source text and a serviceable translation. That difference matters: readers who know both languages can encounter shifts of emphasis, and readers who know only one need not be told they possess a defective half of the work.
Even the title resists a single English gloss. It carries a history connected to Arabic, while in Spanish it can suggest commotion or a multiplicity of voices. Salas Rivera discusses that linguistic path in the interview. The sound of the word is not a decorative sign of cultural mixture. It announces a poem in which categories travel, collide and acquire meanings from those forced to use them. A publisher might shelve it as speculative poetry; its formal problem is also the ordinary political problem of who has authority to name a place or person.
Graywolf lists Salas Rivera as a Puerto Rican poet and translator and published the volume in 2025. Those facts establish context, but the reason to read Algarabía is its refusal to let context become a cage. The book does not ask the bilingual reader to choose which version is the real one. It asks what a story can do when both versions are allowed to invent.