Mendoza Xitlalitl Rodríguez Performance of Jaws – May 21, 2026

Description

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier

Publication Date: May 21, 2026

Publisher Marketing: “Something in my name turns me into a fish under attack,” says Jaws—shark, worker, spectacle. This award-winning poetry collection collapses the distance between sea and office, aquarium and classroom, factory and vacation resort, resumé and body under attack. JAWS is a book about water, breath, and suffocation, about work that disciplines the body, about survival under glass. Through (mis)translation, documentary fragments, and cinematic archive, these poems reveal how capital renders certain lives expendable, human and non-human alike. Fierce, darkly funny, and formally restless, JAWS insists on the shark not as monster, but as mirror—swimming, working, alive and curious about where meaning breaks down across languages, worlds, and personas… and what lurks in the waters between.

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