2026 Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry

2025 Otherwise Award Honor List

Algarabía

La canción de Cenex, hijo natural de la Ínsula Alarabíyaa
(Graywolf Press, 2025)

Algarabía es una epopeya que sigue el viaje de Cenex, un ser trans que narra su vida retrospectivamente mientras navega por las historias contadas en su nombre.

Habitante de Algarabía, una colonia de la Tierra en un universo paralelo, Cenex lucha por encontrar un nombre, un cuerpo y un hogar estables. El canto de Cenex entreteje y enfrenta textos de escritores cis sobre figuras trans con fragmentos de textos históricos, documentos legales y otras fuentes extraliterarias. Su protagonista nos conduce a través de su hospitalización temprana, sus años como sujeto experimental, una breve estancia suburbana, meandros retorcidos y unas tierras no tan lejanas en la compañía de un grupo jovial de cuirs predilectos.

Poblado de referencias a la cultura popular, la cosmología taína y la filosofía (a veces dentro de un mismo verso), este libro se ríe de su propia supervivencia con una rabia pícara y aguda. La epopeya se compone de dos textos originales: uno que fue escrito en español puertorriqueño y el otro que fue escrito en un inglés alterado. Algarabía inscribe un origen para las personas trans ante su exclusión de los cánones literarios coloniales y anticoloniales.

Algarabía

The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyaa
(Graywolf Press, 2025)

Algarabía is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.

An inhabitant of Algarabía, a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home. The song of Cenex weaves and clashes texts by cis writers on trans figures with fragments from historical, legal, and other nonliterary texts. Its protagonist leads us through his childhood hospitalization, his years as an experimental subject, a brief stay in suburbia, twisted meanderings, and not-so-far-off lands accompanied by a merry band of chosen queers.

Referencing everything from pop culture to Taino cosmology and philosophy (at times in a single line), this book laughs at its survival with sharp, unserious rage. The edition is composed of two original texts—one in the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish, the other in a reconsideration of English. Algarabía inscribes an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary canons.

En Algarabía, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera conjura un corte histórico e ingresa a la espiral para agenciar una vida múltiple donde no hay espacio para lo binario. En sus palabras, habilita un portal “no a antaño, sino a otra actualidad”; una poética no solo épica, sino especulativa, un alabao que jaquea el sistema, una fuga transtemporal donde los cuerpos trans cosechan el recorrido de quienes les antecedieron. Algarabía es una invitación a la fuga maricona, donde el goce y la movilidad se imponen como alternativa a los discursos de patria y heroicidad.
Algarabía es epopeya, es mito, es coro, es canción y cuento; es un poema vivo que recorre, en búsqueda de la salida o de una cápsula de escape, las formas y las tradiciones que esta modernidad huérfana nos ha heredado para narrar y poetizar la vida individual y colectiva. En medio de lo malo, Roque Raquel rescata los momentos en corrille, el amor y el deseo, el juego y el tripeo—ese es el santuario trans—; apuesta por la bondad, a pesar de las violencias—y qué muchas violencias, caramba—; apuesta por el futuro—no solo el que nos viene, sino por todos los futuros posibles e imposibles. De ninguno de nuestros archipiélagos ha salido algo así, tan tanto como Algarabía, tan trans; tan profundamente libre. Algarabía es un parteaguas, un acontecimiento.
In the era of labyrinths, binary delusions, erasures, and harms, Algarabía is both salve and triumph. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera cultivates an epic universe, in every sense of the poetic tradition, while subverting the canon to embrace an expansive trans sanctuary of cosmologies, myths, yearning, humor, and joy. This collection is a sigil and atlas that calls out into the abyss a “canto of unwavering tenderness in the face of our extermination.” Salas Rivera gathers a chorus to fashion a trans haven to affirm Algarabía’s “revolution as wild and communal as language.” A language that Salas Rivera dexterously assembles to remind readers that he is one of the most vital voices for today, tomorrow, and the days that must still be imagined.
Algarabía is a gift. Salas Rivera dances along an invisible line between abstract wordplay and character-driven epic narrative, makes it look easy, and ensures that every line sizzles your synapses with the urgent delights and betrayals of the trans fight for existence. Along the way, he keeps coining new word combinations that straddle the fabulous chasm between “What did I just read?” and “This is what I’ve always felt!” Thick blocks of muscular text, shimmering lists of half-invented names that terminate with a political punchline, a litany of resistance, an intimate inversion, poems within poems within the story of a journey of self-discovery, all narrated with sparse precision. This is the trans epic poem that you didn’t know you needed until you’re wrapped in stanzas that feel like getting free.
[Algarabía] is a breathtaking, head-spinning, monumental work of poetic genius.
This cosmic Puerto Rican epic poem written by trans poet, translator and Lambda Literary Award winner, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, is a literary tour de force. In the story of Cenex, a trans being who references multiple universes in breathtaking beauty and humor — from Taino cosmology to Carl Sagan’s pot smoking joy. It’s a genius, too — one side of the book is in Spanish and the other in English — all written by Salas Rivera.
“To transit Algarabía is to enter the muddy terrains of what has been, what is, what could be. To transit Algarabía is to open oneself to a chorus of voices, perhaps dissonant yet nurturing. To transit Algarabía is to betray, to appropriate, to redefine the act of naming, of discourse. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera issues an invitation in what can comfortably be described as his magnum opus: to commit oneself to collective joy and freedom. I was grateful to dwell in Salas Rivera’s book, which felt like a litany for survival amid the pervasive violence of today, a love letter and a gift to le corille trans from the Caribbean archipelago and beyond.”
“The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya” is the book’s subtitle: truly, every paean of resistance, remembrance, and remapping is chorded into these verses. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera gives us a reverse hymnal in Algarabía, a hero’s journey that both courts and subverts the call of the Muse: a manifestation of transness in a versioning of Puerto Rico at once mythopoetic and starkly real. The pleasure in this bilingual reading is political and necessary. The places Cenex will lead you, reader, as he retrospectively guides you through the canto of his life, will reveal universes.
“Aquí la épica quiere fundar algo más que una nación: superar la homogeneidad pretendida sin saber cuál será el destino. Imagine usted parentescos impuros, alianzas transitorias, comunidades de paso que sostienen la vida mientras todo alrededor insiste en borrarla, como ocurre ahora, en un momento en que ICE, la agencia de control migratorio de Estados Unidos, está imponiendo un poder colonial en Estados Unidos, y también en Puerto Rico, deportando migrantes caribeños. El heroísmo, entonces, pareciera estar en la insistencia: en seguir cantando cuando el mundo exige silencio.”
“A different kind of verse novel in an alluring first-person reflection of the inherent fraught experience of living in a society that inhibits free gender expression. The bold text offers an engaging resistance in its experimental array in form and structure, resonating against historical and mythological concepts of gender to build something new.”
“Telling Cenex’s story through the modality of myth reincorporates queerness into the history from which it has been wiped away, and situates a queer trans subject as an epic hero rather than a troubled side character or a cis nightmare-fantasy. Trans existence is not limited to the contemporary; it has its own longstanding mythology and poetics. After reading Salas Rivera’s new trans mythology, the readers join Cenex in experiencing ‘the sublime driving force of a fully trans world.’”
“Like Ángela María Dávila (whom Salas Rivera translated) or Pedro Pietri (whose punk utopianism is an obvious point of reference), Salas Rivera writes us toward a future that we don’t yet know how to read, creating his own language and showing us the way. Here’s to a future where Algarabía is the air that we breathe.”