A Hologram of Longing and Desire
A Review of Luis Correa-Díaz's Up From Georgia-lcd by Alex Lima
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Neuroscientists have established that place cells in the brain function as a GPS tracking system that enables us to navigate familiar and unfamiliar territories. These place cells also contribute to cementing memories in the long run after performing the same task multiple times. At first glance, each poem in Luis Correa-Diaz’s Up from Georgia-lcd serves a similar function to that of a place cell, each vignette is a reference point on a map that subtly mirrors the poet’s life but at the same time enhances the possibilities of alternate realities in the lcd multiverse [scan the QR code]. Nothing is gratuitous in lcd’s poetry, from his choice of “14-point Georgia font” to including information “where to find” the epitaph on his grave, every bit of information functions both as a red pin and a hyperlink, a never-ending chain of references interwoven into a multidimensional hologram at the reader’s fingertips. These metatextual cultural and historical references abound throughout this poetry collection, adding a sensorial aspect, that again, anchors the reader back to a core memory but at the same time elicits alternate readings: REM’s “that was just a dream” (pun intended) transports the reader into a “Canticle of the Sun” taking us back to church, back to Athens, Georgia, and back to Athens, Greece— the cradle of our reproduction of Western civilization. In this back and forth between origin myth and endless possibilities, lcd takes us on a wild ride that at first glance reverts us to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence (ancestral roots, rivers, cosmos, father, mother, college life, cafés, and poetry readings), but has more to do with Baudrillard’s hyperreality—mere representations of past, present, and future realities. The Odysseus in this collection is not yearning to return to an Ithaca found on a map, in a fixed location, but rather to a moveable and malleable target that takes on many shapes and forms, be it poetry, beauty, death, song, cyborgs, dreams, or holographic representations of all these elements. |
In this sense, the place cells and the points of reference mentioned above, expand into more encompassing grid cells —virtual maps that resemble grids of repeating triangles. Just like the myth of Arachne, the poet weaves ever-expanding tapestries with patches of cellular poems that feed off each other. A verse from the poem “Neighbors” (they accepted NQs my broken English), serves as pre-text for the next poem titled “English” (your homeland we have only traveled in dreams), which in turn gives way to the poem “Dreams”, and so on. Eduardo Galeano reminds us that the Spanish word for weaving (tejer) derives from the Latin textum, thus writing itself is another form of weaving new artifacts out of the imagination, quilts that function as receptacles of memory but also depict the aspirations of the future. In Up from Georgia-lcd, Luis Correa-Díaz brings us back and forth to the many representations of (his) Athens, GA named after Athena, the Greek goddess of war, wisdom and courage. We truly hope that the author’s holographic tapestry does not enrage the mythological figure, since as storytelling creatures we need myth to persevere.
Mihaela Moscaliuc’s back-cover blurb is in itself a piece of poetic rendition that summarizes the very core of Up from Georgia-lcd while making aware the reader of its metaverse-writing practice,
Don’t let the demure-looking, tuneful wreath of sestets fool you. Intertextual and self-referential, these sharp poetic sound bites shimmer with intellectual verve, humor, and “sci-tech verbal prestidigitations.” They reflect on place and democracy, on our future as “proto-cyborgs” and on our collective delusions. Is “the bio-exceptionalism we/affirm” “a miracle or a liability,” this consummate “practitioner of metaverse” asks, inviting us to ponder the possibility that maybe “Eden was always a sphere in Las Vegas.” This “first installment” of Luis Correa-Diaz’s Up from Georgia-lcd is a tour de force.
Luis Correa-Diaz is a corresponding Member to Academia Chilena de la Lengua and Real Academia de Ciencias, Letras y Artes de Córdoba (Spain), poet and Distinguished Research Professor of Digital Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Georgia-USA. He is the author of La Bandera de Chile es extranjera en su propio país. La poesía civil/insurrecta de Elvira Hernández (2025), Latin American Digital Poetics (con Scott Weintraub, 2024), La región antártica famosa (2025), Trilogía pro tempore (2025), among others.
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