Lo Terciario/The Tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera

The Unseen Book Club

Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a book of auto-translated poems by Raquel Salas Rivera (based in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia), interrogates the intimacies of familial bonds, gender, and colonization through a unique deployment of key concepts from Marx. “Formal” exposition of Marxian conceptions of debt, circulation, and the value form entangle moments of autobiographical detail within the history of anti-colonial struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the context of the United States’ colonial response to Puerto Rico’s “national debt crisis.”

It’s a conceptually dense hook, but the poems are lucid, rich and intimate. We expose our status as deeply amateur Marxologists, talk about how poetry is a perfect medium for theoretical exposition, and raise unanswerable questions about the politics of translation.

Raquel Salas Rivera

Max wrote a *great* article about Pedro Scarón 1976 translation of Capital, which we speak about in the episode. Download it here.

DisemPOWERed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm (2019) is an excellent documentary about Puerto Rican political economy, debt, and austerity.