Talk Shows has the double distinction of being the first English-language title by poet, translator, and scholar Mónica de la Torre and the first release of the new Chicago feminist press, Switchback Books. De la Torre has published one Spanish-language volume and multiple important anthologies and works of translation, including the indispensable Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon) and the revelatory Gerardo Deniz: Poemas/Poems (Lost Roads and Taller Dittoria). Reading Talk Shows, one feels the trace not so much of a writing hand as that of a verbose and erudite selector, accessing languages, etymologies, dictions, and lingos and putting her omni-language through Oulipian machines to create syntactically-charged, queer-toned texts. These collaborations, multi-translations, games, centos, and other rule-governed forms paradoxically serve to break the conventional bounds of contemporary discourse.

Such rich theoretical implications are introduced by the book's seemingly casual, lo-brow title. On the one hand, a talk show is a kind of ensemble performance, in which a motile host, microphone in hand, mediates (rhetorically and visually) between a cast of archetypal 'guests,' usually isolated on the stage, backstage or even in glass booths, and a non-individuated, raucous, monovocal 'audience' who roars in response to slangy barbs from host and guest. Transparent, expressive speech and supposedly ad-libbed behavior is actually the result of a generic setup, careful casting, and even scripting. The viewer at home can also participate in this theatre, talking back to or calling in to the talk show; this element makes talk shows and their decade-old offspring, "reality" television, more engaging than shows which do not rattle the cage bars of the fourth wall. Engaging as they may be, talk shows, with their disingenuous miming of demotic dialogue and transparency, call into question whether any 'talk' is really 'unscripted' or if it is all part of the 'show.' De la Torre's poems make their home in this ambiguous territory, exploring and expanding it. Tone, form, even content are all mutable and mutant affairs prescribed by game, rule, satire, collaboration, even the occult sound-and-syntactical patterns inherent in particular languages and evident in language itself.

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