The Cry of the Senses

“In this insightful and creative work, Ren Ellis Neyra centers affect against mandates to perform Latinidad as positivist, representational, and recuperative. Offering substantive methodological, theoretical, and analytical contributions, The Cry of the Senses is primed to reorient the direction of Latinx studies.” - Leticia Alvarado, author of Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production

“The Cry of the Senses is at once a poetic, disruptive, and critically demanding work. Ren Ellis Neyra theorizes the ways in which sensorial and material inventiveness, improvisation, and experimental ruptures are primary forms of thought and resistance in the Caribbean. It is a rare and profoundly pleasurable event when a critical work is exemplary of the material practices it explores, itself an eruption, a detour and a break. The work's poetic, expansive theorizing is promiscuous, high-low, feral, committed, and sly. It is a marvelous rearrangement of anticolonial frequencies and geologies, and a delight.” - Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

“This is a poetic and thought-provoking study.... The Cry of the Senses represents an important contribution to Caribbean and Latinx studies.” - Michael Niblett, Journal of American Studies

“The Cry of the Senses shows—and, to some extent, argues—that the tools of poetics can be deployed to different ends, in non-totalizing ways. . . . Ellis Neyra demonstrates the creative potential and the conceptual excitement enabled by a more situated, more embodied response to, and examination of, literary and other texts.” - Sarah Dowling, Poetics

“The Cry of the Senses offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. . . . This is also a beautiful book in its own right that performs what it theorizes: poetic listening to a multifaceted archive that articulates worlds until now only imagined.” - Pamela Zamora Quesada, Chiricú Journal

“Rejecting the white, Western focus on reason and the individual, the author foregrounds brownness, Afro-Latinidad, and Blackness to undermine racist and colonialist world views. . . . [The Cry of the Senses] is a rich and relevant text. Recommended.” - Choice

"The book is a profoundly needed contribution that offers a frame for exploring multisensorial poetics alongside work focusing on Caribbean silences and quiet solidarities." - Martin Tsang, New West Indian Guide