“What we have is our word”: A conversation with Éric Morales-Franceschini on Syndrome – curated by Wendy Chen


Éric Morales-Franceschini’s debut poetry collection Syndrome (Anhinga, 2024) is a work of razor-sharp beauty. With an expansive vision of history, Syndrome places personal history and identity within the political history of Puerto Rico and its continual resistance against colonization. In the introduction to the text, Juan Felipe Herrara, who chose the work as the winner of the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, writes that, “This is a rare project and a necessary poetics in these times of extremist ideologies given the erosion of traditional belief systems and skewed power at large. It tackles the daily struggle for Being VS the ongoing onslaught of erasure, forced allegiance, go-home-ism, personal and historical invisibility as a Puerto Rican.” 

Wendy Chen: The word “syndrome” makes a consistent appearance throughout the text, in both the body of poems and their titles: “Imposter Syndrome,” “Stockholm Syndrome,” “Puerto Rican Syndrome,” “Rally ‘Round the Flag Syndrome,” “New World Syndrome.” As medical terminology, “syndrome” is a way of describing symptoms of illness or woundedness on the body. Then, there is also the etymology of “syndrome,” which is drawn from the Greek syndromos “place where several roads meet,” “a running together.” Both meanings feel very much a kind of description of the collection, and I was wondering if you could speak on how you decided upon Syndrome as the title?

Éric Morales-Franceschini:  Yes, “syndrome” is that notional concept by which the collection thematically coheres, and precisely because it’s so apropos not just psychosomatically but historically and geopolitically in the case of Puerto Rico.  What readers won’t likely know is that “Puerto Rican Syndrome” was actually the name of a codified mental disorder, conjured to life in the 1950s by Anglo Army doctors who were trying to make sense of bizarre symptoms in Puerto Rican soldiers, most of them Korean War veterans, but extrapolated to the population at large, not least low-income women of color.  The psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici has pointed out that the reported symptoms were similar to classical hysteria with some schizoid complications.  But rather than pathologize, Gherovici theorizes their ill-at-ease-ness—indeed, as you say, their “woundedness”—as an allegory of imperial dispossession, the pathology of a racialized and colonized otherness.  The poetry in Syndrome does likewise; it interrogates a host of wounds and rewrites our many idiosyncrasies as (sub)conscious protests to the coloniality of power.  

WC: Syndrome is composed of four distinct sections. The first section takes an unflinching look at the history of the family and the speaker, while contextualizing the history of Puerto Rico. The second intensifies this vision and brings in quotations and numerical data as a critique of power (most strikingly in the poem “I am writing a story of love in a time of data fascism.” The third section interweaves history with landscape and language as a form of “testimony,” a word that appears in different forms throughout the section. The last section shakes up the form of the collection with one long poem titled “New World syndrome: an anti-ekphrasis.” As a reader, the conversations within and between sections felt so incredibly alive and rich with each successive page. How did the structure of this collection come together?

ÉM:  It’s lovely to hear that the sections felt alive and rich!  Indeed, they were not haphazardly thrown together.  As you’ve noted, the first section is more intimate and lyrical, with much material that is anecdotal and familial.  This invites the reader in to be moved and invested, giving them a sense for the author’s and his kin’s lived experiences.  By the second section we delve into larger contexts and referents, mostly those by which Puerto Rico and Boricuas are (un)seen from afar, whether it be in West Side Story or in electoral and demographic data, then in the third section the reader is taken on a journey through some of Puerto Rico’s most tumultuous events, from Columbus to the Spanish-American War of 1898, the eugenics law of 1937 and the anti-independence “gag” law of 1949 to the PROMESA Act of 2016.  The collection moves, thereby, from interiority to exteriority, from testimony to history, from empathy to outrage, the personal to the political, giving the reader opportunities to become familiar, incrementally, with what’s at stake and more poised, by the end, to appreciate just how capacious and ambitious the collection is—or rather, must be. 

WC: What other texts were you reading or in conversation with while writing Syndrome?

ÉM:  Syndrome has many debts.  I owe a special thanks to those poets who, if only in literary terms, accompanied and inspired me as I wrote, most especially Ada Limón, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Mahmoud Darwish, J. Michael Martinez, and Daniel Borzutzky.  The Boricua poets Julia de Burgos and Raquel Rivera Salas were important referents, too, but arguably the most kindred spirit with whom I was “in conversation” was Craig Santos Perez, the Chamorro poet from Guam, whose from unincorporated territory series is astonishingly salient.  That said, theorists such as Marx, Freud, and Frantz Fanon were just as vital to the work.  Without them, the poetry would be far less analytically incisive—let alone, all the more politically docile!    

WC: As a writer and teacher, I’m very much interested in documentary poetry—a genre I see Syndrome working within. In her essay “A Poetry of Proximity,” Solmaz Sharif writes:

When I am asked to describe my poetry on airplane flights, at dinner parties, I describe it first as “political.” Then, “documentary.” . . . I am interested in a lyric record of history informed and inflected by a variety of languages—sympathy cards, depositions, grocery lists, stock quotes—each with their own music, their own relationship to power, to death. Inserting the languages of the powerful and the meek into poems reveals their formal qualities, so that the architecture of taken-for-granted language reveals itself. The State exerts (or at least attempts) authority over us in many ways, including its use of language: passive construction, missing subjects, riotous chiasmus, etc. A combination of rhetorical flourish, euphemism, and passivity provide the State with the means to justify, formally, warfare. . . In a poem, our relationship to these languages change. 

Do you see poetry as changing our relationship to language or revealing the language of the State and, if so, how?

ÉM:  I think of documentary poetics as a technique or tactic and as a sensibility, I suppose.  And it can’t be a coincidence that so many of its most influential tacticians hail from the global South or identify, broadly, with the poetry of witness.  So there’s Sharif’s Look, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas, and there’s Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain, which is maybe the apotheosis of documentary poetics in our day.  If it’s de rigueur right now, maybe there’s perfectly sound reasons for that, namely that it, like few other “genres,” situates our verse in a far more robust and unequivocal confrontation with the rhetoric of sovereign power—whether that be the repressive apparatus of the State or of Capital, to which every state on the planet is more or less systemically subservient!  With documentary poetics, we can offer our critical commentary on that official rhetoric and do so in surprising, artful ways that move and edify people.  And that’s a noteworthy intervention.  It’s not, after all, as if we poets or ordinary citizens get invited to the World Economic Form or to give congressional testimony and the like.  Nor do we have any weighty military or financial power.  What we have is our word.  That may sound feeble or altogether futile, but I’ve seen how deeply therapeutic, pedagogical, and creatively dangerous poetry can be, especially when it doesn’t flounder in hopelessly abstract ruminations.  And so I deploy as many viable tactics as I can, which no doubt includes documentary poetics but also adopts etymological exegesis, hymnal-like ballads, mythopoetics, statistical data, and “clinical” (counter)diagnostics.               

WC: Syndrome opens with the poem “I ask my mother why we left Puerto Rico and she says...” which describes a story of the goddess Atabey. The story if one of birth and creation: “from their excrement / came the hibiscus” which is “blood red / like the memory of loss.” As a reader, I’m immediately arrested by these juxtapositions between “excrement” and a flower, a memory recalled and what is lost. How did you decide to open the collection with this story and the maternal voice/force (of both the speaker’s mother and Atabey figured as a mother)? 

ÉM:  It’s only fitting: the two people who cared for me most lovingly in my most formative years were my mother and her mother, my abuela (grandmother).  It was they who tethered my bond to the isla and its ways, its enchantments as much as its sorrows.  You felt it in their dialect, their religiosity, their flamboyance and warmth.  And so Atabey, the first mother, mother of mothers: it had to start there, my tribute to her and them—all of them—and my deference to their wisdom as caretakers who warn their children of the dangers that lurk.       

WC: What did the revision process look like for this collection?

ÉM:  I wrote this collection in about two years, though its content is owed to far more than two years’ worth of research—let alone living.  It was never a continuous writing affair, inasmuch as fits of inspired writing and, later, more disciplined revision.  There would be several months when all I read was history, political economy, sociology, psychanalysis and critical theory—a period in which I’d take extensive notes and earmark the most pressing issues and events I’d hope to weigh in on poetically—and then months when all I read was poetry, in order to prompt my creative faculties.  Syndrome actually grew out of my chapbook, Autopsy of Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, but it matured aesthetically and conceptually thanks to all that interdisciplinary study and my periodic “fasting” from poetry.    

WC: What did your writing process look like for the poems in this collection? As someone who writes across different genres, does your writing process change across genres or remain fairly consistent? What do you do when you feel stuck in your writing?

ÉM:  I enjoy writing both scholarly works and poetry, and I’m convinced that each are richer for it.  No doubt, they each require their own discipline and offer their own payoffs.  With scholarly prose and research, I’m held accountable to logic, textual evidence, terminological accuracy, and conceptual rigor, while with poetry I can flaunt speculation, revelry, affect, storytelling, and the like.  I rarely write in each genre simultaneously, but they have a way of inflecting each other, making my poetry more conceptually rigorous and my scholarly prose more aesthetically intriguing, if not agreeable.  That back and forth keeps me limber and never bored.  If I can’t get any headway with one, I switch over to the other.  

WC: You end the collection with the phrase “our work here is not done,” a phrase that rings in the reader long after they put the collection aside. The phrase at once invites the reader into the work the collection is enacting, as well as extends the force of the collection our into the world beyond the physical pages of the book. How did you come to end on this phrase?    

ÉM:  It couldn’t be otherwise: the archive of history and its towering monuments to injustice cry aloud that our work here is not done.  That last poem looks to (and away from) the world’s largest Columbus monument, which just happens to stand in none other than Puerto Rico.  It’s a monstrosity.  It’s larger (base included) than the Statue of Liberty and Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue.  Does that not speak volumes!?  But let me be clear: the “our” in that phrase is an open invitation, not an already assumed or fixated identity.  Syndrome wasn’t just written for (or about) Puerto Rico and its diasporas; it was written for any and all peoples preyed upon by imperial power, which is why that closing line bears within it not so much the cumulative weight of 33 poems inasmuch as 500 years of (de)colonial history and emancipatory desire.  

WC: What advice would you give other poets who are also working on or submitting their first poetry collection for publication?

ÉM:  I like to know what’s at stake in a poetry collection and, especially, when the project thematically coheres—maybe even has, as it were, a “thesis.”  If you, as the writer, know there’s something noteworthy at stake and that it couldn’t be written by anyone else but you, in any other genre but poetry, then you’re well on your way: keep writing until you have a substantial number of poems that “run together” (Greek syndromos) and then worry about organization and sequence.  Other than that, it’s really about (i) your fit with a literary press and (ii) your tenacity to stick with it.  Wager on those presses (and judges) that publish work and styles you aesthetically or otherwise admire.  And don’t give up.  When I first sent Syndrome out, it was rejected across the board—not even “longlisted” or honorably mentioned.  And rightly so!  It wasn’t ready.  It didn’t yet thematically or sequentially cohere, and some poems just weren’t as formally inventive or lexically effectual as they could be.  But I stuck with it, and within a year it was being shortlisted for many awards.  Once you’ve been named a “finalist” or the like, you have leverage to reach out to publishers, since your work has been independently vetted.  In other words, you don’t need to win in order to win. 

WC: What are you working on next?

ÉM:  My next creative project is inspired by the summer of 2020, that ecstatic summer when so many Columbus statues in the US were, as it were, “decommissioned.”  But rather than only look to the US (or Puerto Rico), let alone the twenty first century, I am delving deeper into Columbus (counter)memorials across the centuries and throughout the Americas.  This has taken a fair amount of research, needless to say, but the yields are well worth it.  I draw on papal decrees, travelogues, court cases, epic poems, paintings, and sculptures and on indigenous, Black, and populist rebuttals.  Documentary poetics, (anti)ekphrasis, odes, prose poetry, and theoretical exegesis are my expressive tactics of choice.  With some luck, I’ll have a full draft by the end of this calendar year.  I can’t say it will be a triumph, but I’m very excited about it.  It has a lot to offer.