Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. Translated with verve by JD Pluecker, the book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos.
Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan’s HD Book, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon’s Rimbaud the Son, Fabre’s Writing with Caca is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer.
