Jaws

Aswim in night terrors and dark foreboding, JAWS circles its prey, quietly sneaking up on readers entranced by the rocking waves of its verse, creatively co-translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier. If “to tooth means to cling to the world,” then JAWS takes a big bite out of reality, jumping off the screen and out of its pen, leaving this uncanny literary account in its wake. —David Buuck

“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.