Expendables

Originally written in Spanish, Expendables (Temporarias) is a collection of poetry left unfinished by Emma Villazón before her unexpected passing in 2015. Translated into English by Thomas Rothe, the book is a patchwork of poems written from the perspective of multiple women workers, exploring the relationships between labor, immigration and gender, especially at “factories that manufacture intellectual products, in particular companies whose raw material is the word.” In the words of the poet herself, the book “aims to relate the condition of workers who resist the logic of modern factories with the immigrant experience from a feminine gender perspective. In this sense, the project deals with the double violence that marks these on the one hand, workplace violence governed by pragmatism and profit motives that deteriorate the physiological, psychological, and social conditions of workers; on the other hand, the violence of disrupted cultural, social, and family coordinates, as in the case of the foreign woman.”