Pause the Document

Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in New York City. She is the author of six books of poetry, of which the most recent, Repetition Nineteen (2020), centers on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (2017)—a riff on a riff on Kafka's Amerika—and Public Domain (2009). Recent art writing focuses on Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas series, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats, and Ulises Carrión’s bookworks. She also has co-edited several anthologies, most recently, Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (2020). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.

“In Mónica de la Torre’s hands, opacity is all etymology. . . In these Wordsworthian poems, the speaker, distressed by the social order, turns, intrigued, to trees: their properties, lives, language, and entanglements. Rebounding their kaleidoscopic thinking and consciousness off the surfaces and textures of the landscape, the brilliant poems of Pause the Document remind us how we can “unfold as a flow” inside language and life.”—Claudia Rankine"Sharp yet expansive . . . flush with meaning." —Diana Arterian, Lit Hub"Mónica de la Torre’s Pause the Document (Nightboat Books, 2025) is at once dream collection, pursuit of linguistic truth, and ode to place. de la Torre accomplishes excavation across languages, memory, and possibility with etymological attentiveness and genuine curiosity."—Livia Meneghin, antiphony"This volume promises to be classic de la Torre: lists, overheard language, discourse mash-up, and elliptical yet resonant images. Her brilliant reading from it at the Poetry Project in May left the entire audience enchanted and hungry for more."—Evie Shockley, Academy of American Poets Newsletter"Rigorous yet casual, funny and fierce, intimate and formidable, Pause the Document invokes the documentary impulse and turns it back on itself in ways that are seriously playful and deeply enjoyable. The poems gather disparate materials, voices, and various languages (sometimes with translations—and nuanced considerations of translation’s complexities) . . . de la Torre is a knowledgeable and beautifully present guide."—Laura Mullen, California Review of Books“What’s a pathogen when humans have “a tendency to ruin things” with language? In this bio-political linguistic dead reckoning, de la Torre’s magisterial re-versioning of an infected language system re-scrambles itself into a linguistic hammering, like a pause or a dream, the language that’s been playing us all along.”—Tan Lin"[Pause the Document] memorializes the years during which it was written, insofar as it demonstrates how socio-political ruptures so quickly remind us of the fragile ground upon which systems of logic and meaning rest. . . a great book about impermanence, trees, the pathways of stars, cabin fever, pre-linguistic infants and healing."—Marko Gluhaich, Frieze“Mónica de la Torre’s majestic “password in gift form,” unlocks unrestricted access to what it means to love and to be loved within impermanence and loss. Amidst the sentient, kaleidoscopic intimacy of her writing, “the pathology of our entanglement” gets mapped onto everything. Pause the Document is our sensate dowsing branch detecting all frequencies of where language can lead us.”—Kim Rosenfield  “Pause the Document functions as poem, prose, and riddle. Everyday incidents tilt into paradigms and elegies for existence. Reading this studied yet humorous and deftly crafted book is like hanging out with a friend—many turns and returns to cherish.”—Moriah Evans“In this defiantly anti-documentary poetics, de la Torre’s “counter-texts” score “how the poem’s aboutness became its burden” and tease out new ecologies of meaning. Pause the Document argues for an “erotics of intermittence,” a new temporal embodied geography where the self and language are also built environments and where we embrace poetry as a beautifully burning archive, a confusion of excess, renewal, and ruin.”—Urayoán Noel  "[Mónica de la Torre] vacillates between lyric and experimental modes (including several amalgams of found speech) to catalogue the sense of weirdness, periodic despair, and temporal circulatory that followed her through the pandemic."—Connor Fisher, DIAGRAM"If future alien civilizations might seek to understand how we lived, or at least tried to, one might hope they could find their way to these poems . . . exploratory, declarative, engaged and curious; shifting prose blocks to line breaks, a variation on rhythms, propulsion, offering exploratory statements on human language and being."—rob mclennan, periodicities"Voice, shadow, body."—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine"As the world shuts down, Mónica de la Torre’s poems become gregarious sites of encounter—homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by looping the temporalities of dreams, art, the natural world,  emotion, and odd encounters under extraordinary circumstances. Richer and more playful than straightforward records, these poems are portals into the intangible dimensions of daily life."—Vagabond City