The Book of Conjurations, Irizelma Robles’s fourth poetry collection, transforms poet, reader and language through its conjurations. Among these pages, we find all forms of material existence transmuted. Barbwire, rain, soul, sugarcane, scream are all raw materials for alchemy, or poetry.

Drawing from the periodic table, precious and semi-precious stones, minerals, rocks, the elements, flora and fauna from Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and Latin America, and her memories, Robles creates an alternate cosmogony that neither rejects nor unquestioningly accepts Western medical discourse, nor offers up one of many parallel traditions and bodies of knowledge. These poems are written to conjure another life out of this one, a way forward despite and with the poet’s neurodivergence, sadness, depression, and anxiety. Irizelma imagines herself as the poet-alchemist in order to conjure another self in that poetic voice, one that not only survived these hospitalizations, but that found metaphor, imagen, and poetic figure in the basest of elements. It is also a voice that found gold to be as useless as it was for all who sought it, a tool of power that ultimately became dead weight in her search for a way out.

Irizelma Robles was born in Puerto Rico in 1973. She is a poet and essayist who has published the collections of poems De Pez Ida (2003), Isla Mujeres (2008), Agave Azul (2015), Alumbre (2018), El templo de Samye (2020), Lacustre (2020), winner of the International Poetry Award “Pedro Lastra,” and the anthropology monograph The Tide of the Dead (2009).

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican poet and translator of trans experience born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. Among his six poetry books are lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi Press, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title for no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera has edited the anthologies Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019) and La piel del arrecife. Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (La Impresora & Atarraya Cartonera, 2023).