Suspended on waves of arrebato, 
I turned toward the vast memory of loss
and knew it was time to forgive protecting
this pre-T, lightning-in-a-blackout body.

One of the two epigraphs of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s latest book, Algarabía, quotes queer activist Leslie Feinberg: “There was a terrible moment in my life where I realized / the books I was looking to read, I might have to write them.” Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of Isle of Alarbiyya must be the answer to Salas Rivera’s own longing, a work that wields the personal, political and magical to create a poem of queer mythology.

Published by Graywolf Press in 2025, the book is a trans epic poem of self-discovery and survival. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera expands the experience of transness beyond gender:  in the troubled “citizenship” of colonized Puerto Rico, in language, in migration or forced relocation. The queer body is able to traverse borders and expand possibilities in a way that is fiercely antagonistic to the cis-hetero empire.

Across the epic’s five Cantos, our protagonist, Cenex, wanders his home island-planet of Algarabía to discover his true origins and continue his journey of transformation. The Spanish word algarabía comes from the word for Arabic, and originally denoted incomprehensible speech but now denotes hub bub, jubilation and a cacophony of voices overlapping. As a trans Puerto Rican poet and translator, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera saw this word as an expression of the trans experience but also the mixed and inventive dialects of Caribbean Spanish. 

In the spirit of algarabía, the poems are told from a large and diverse chorus of characters, though primarily through the words of Cenex himself. Salas Rivera notes his love for epics, which are “weird objects” often riddled with tangents and transplanted language. Salas Rivera’s epic, however, queers theme and format, often playful, humorous, ironic and inventive. These poems vary in font, size, alignment, become images, turn upside down and inside out, yell at each other, and whisper secrets. 

‍ ‍Algarabía is primarily an exploration of trans origins and self-narration. In Canto I, Salas Rivera recounts the Greek myth of Caenis, the nymph raped by Poseidon who asks to be transformed into the man Caenus. Cenex is told this is his origin, but he does not recognize Caenus as himself and asks the Muse to help guide “beyond official history” and create his own trans narrative outside of cis tellings. Along his journey, Cenex must confront a mysterious world filled with the everyday violence of bigots and “transvestigators” who continuously attempt to hijack and rewrite his tale. 

Cenex’s story is also fundamentally linked to the conditions of occupation and empire. Algarabía, an almost-Puerto Rico located in a parallel universe, is colonized by Earth. Salas Rivera infuses Puerto Rican culture and spirit into this collection and explores the island’s precarious status as an American colony. The book opens with tourists crowding Algarabía’s beaches and displacing natives, emphasizing the feeling of dislocation and estrangement caused by occupation: 

Even if the fighting ends, we can’t return.
The families that forgot us aren’t waiting, 
and if, for whatever reason, we win, 
our glory will march wearing its sorrow, 
and we’ll wander among the wounded
as if we, ourselves were shot. 

Our telling is a war unto itself.

from Cenex describes his origins, 7

Algarabía’s attitude towards the empire is hostile, constantly challenging and rebuking its domain. In a moment of revelation, Cenex discovers he is originally from a different Earth colony, yet rather than feel uprooted by the news, he embraces his history as yet another instance of transness: “To know I was from Xamsi, but I was of Algarabía. / What pride! I was trans in every way” (170). Cenex rejects a framework of victimhood for one of queerness; he is proud of his multiple origins even as they contain echoes of colonial violence. Salas Rivera closes the door on empire/patriarchy’s attempted invasion into the queer soul in this expression of trans pride. 

As when a drink boyfriend knocks
and cries outside a locked door, 
so too empire wishes it could enter
our hearts, and oh, how it tries!
Sometimes successfully, but most
often, we are hard in our softness, 
and say, no thank you and fuck off!

from Heart Cemetery, 156

———

I spent much of the first Canto orienting myself to Salas Rivera’s singular style with its lists, creative use of fonts, and incorporation of Spanish. Rather than include a reader’s guide at the beginning, Salas Rivera writes in an endnote titled “A Note on Nomenclature and Style”:

“I didn’t want to offer any guidance or explanation for how Algarabía should be read that would do Cenex and his world a disservice. After all, it engages with misunderstandings just as much as it engages with identity formation and transformation.”

The opacity of both form and content is part of the world-building Salas Rivera sought to do in Algarabía, as trans colonial experience is nothing but clear, and as stated, misunderstandings constantly arise. Salas Rivera included both English and Spanish versions in the book, intending for them to be read side by side. Salas Rivera writes, “Cenex Algarabía does not exist to explain himself. The version in Spanish is its own thing. The version in English is its own thing. Together they, like the chorus, are sometimes harmonious, but most often clashing or indifferent…” Neither version is the original, rather they express Cenex’s tale through each language’s unique syntax and poetic instruments. Yet the Spanish language is as much a part of Cenex’s story as any plot point and therefore refuses to be translated or made foreign through italicization in the English version. Cenex’s story is not only a translation of a queer life, but an inter-language dialogue: “This canto and the rest, translation” (168). 

One of the questions Algarabía asks is “When does transness begin? When does it end?” Canto V “Happy Birthday Cenex!” is the final chapter of this odyssey and yet also Cenex’s birthday, an ending and a beginning. After all, transition “is a neverending process,” a neverending becoming. After reaching the queer paradise of Simurgh, Cenex’s trans elders guide him through his first testosterone shot. At the moment of his injection, “a multiverse portal opens in the text”:

to think that a continuum might be quartered
by //verses. That in another //verse, another me, 
in his bathroom, in a suburb named Villa Nevárez,
in a city called San Juan, in the colony-country of Puerto Rico, 
under an empire self-titled The United States (informally declared America)
in this exact moment, was alone, 
with a syringe in his hand
and a chorus in his head, facing
the mirror and imagining a life
ushered in by the union of 
who I was and who I was
    to become. 

Salas Rivera brings together the voices, the doubts and confusion of the trans experience with the euphoria of transformation. Within the humor, the tragedy, and the chaos, Salas Rivera imbeds his deeply personal reflection:

When you see young Cenexes in this world, 
going to their appointments, taking HRT
despite murders and fines, 
they look shower fresh.

Had I intuited the odyssey of trans reiteration, 
I would have placed an early chemical bet, 
but I was to wander long before I understood
not just how to change, but how to choose. 

From Late-stage transitions, 62

Telling Cenex’s story through the modality of myth reincorporates queerness into the history from which it has been wiped away, and situates a queer trans subject as an epic hero rather than a troubled side character or a cis nightmare-fantasy. Trans existence is not limited to the contemporary; it has its own longstanding mythology and poetics. After reading Salas Rivera’s new trans mythology, the readers join Cenex in experiencing “the sublime driving force of a fully trans world.”