Pause the Document. Mónica de la Torre. Nightboat Books, 2025. 120 pages.
Mónica de la Torre’s Pause the Document (Nightboat Books, 2025) is at once dream collection, pursuit of linguistic truth, and ode to place. de la Torre accomplishes excavation across languages, memory, and possibility with etymological attentiveness and genuine curiosity. Her keenness to notice signals the special relationship made possible by deeply knowing a place, a skill more and more replaced by technology that tries to think on behalf of people. She applies self-awareness with scientific accuracy to linguistic research, recollections of interactions with friends, and acceptance of a world responding to a global pandemic with varied success.
Distance—whether between friends scattered through an urban landscape, between definitions of the same word in the same language, or between present and past selves—is equally painstaking and too tempting to ignore. The recognition of absence is inherently the recognition of distance, or even loss. de la Torre offers “The Distance Calculator” for times when that distance is out of a person’s control. In this poem, she provides instructions, including:
5. Gauge the temporal and spatial intervals between
being at the right place at the right time and being
at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Quantify in units of gratitude or regret
depending on the situation.
The urge to quantify the unquantifiable is a result of feeling at a loss, as the phrase goes in English. Distance contributes to misremembering and vagueness, therefore, also to feeling ungrounded. Early in the collection, de la Torre notes, “if an utterance is a curve, all of its points are at an / equal but growing distance from its focus.” Turning to exactitudes and to studies of precision such as mathematics is one natural reaction to the perplexing and the unsettling.
Pause the Document is also a project of association and hybridity. Research is crucial for this work, and I greatly admire de la Torre’s dedication to full understanding. Many poets write to get as close as possible to the truth, compelled by the responsibility and desire to reflect reality and inspire connection. Poets with access to multiple languages, knowledge sets from different genres, and outside voices (whether from external research or conversation with community) creatively use specificity to express themselves authentically. “Saucer Magnolia,” for example, sources language from encyclopedic and botanical publications of varied genre: notices, diaries, manuals, etc. At the end of the poem, the speaker reflects on this mosaic of information, saying,
Information runs through these lines like sap,
leading to an inflorescence that’s a terminal,
solitary flower.
Notice how the poem’s aboutness became its burden.
How many other ways are there
to know trees.
Here de la Torre both makes a didactic command—to notice—and gestures toward curiosity. Wonder starts with observation. Noticing leads to knowing, which then leads to further questions. For example, the word “inflorescence,” above, a noun, can mean both the entire head of the flower (including stems, petals, etc.) and the process of flowering. The thing itself and its process of being are one in the same.
This labor of knowing also involves memory, which, despite attempts at compilation and research, can be more difficult to ascertain. In “Remote Disjunctions,” de la Torre asks, “If you don’t remember a name, / does it mean you don’t care to remember. You’d taken yourself / to places whose specifics you’d chosen to forget. You said you / weren’t there to keep track, but to experience.” Too often, memories a person wants to forget stay with them, and memories a person wants to remember fade away. As a person quite distanced from her place of birth and many family members who she used to call home, I know this feeling all too well. If knowing something—a place, a person, a truth—means naming, exactness, and compartmentalizing multitudes of accounts, then the process depends on memory. In Pause the Document, de la Torre pushes back against the idea that you cannot care for something without truly knowing it. There’s merit and agency in memory, de la Torre offers. Creating a record, mental, written, or otherwise, is not the only indicator of reality. What a person carries with them every day, and how those experiences and feelings translate into poetry—no matter how indirect incorrect, or incomplete—are valid markers of truth, as well.
Navigating memory, information from research and experience, and becoming a person who lives with intention in this chaotic world, de la Torre shares intimate moments of self-reflection. Her poem, “Obverse,” meditates on the titular pause, the slowing down that causes a person finally to confront all that is around them, inside them, and in their future. While looking at photographs from time spent in Acapulco, she asks, “Was the beach narrow or lobster-shaped? // [Dorothy’s] nostalgia rhymes with mine as I try to locate the place we stayed at….” I resonate with this recognition of rhyming, of being in sync with someone else who shares a similar pull to the past. Often, identifying a connection to the past in the present can shape the future in powerful ways. People can affirm each other’s memories and find validation in acknowledging that a shared history is still active in influencing decision-making for those who carry it. de la Torre beautifully articulates the experience of passing through time, orienting herself spatially and temporally for readers (who don’t have memories of what she describes) to stay close and still follow along. Her confessional tone renders these experiences through questions such as “Where am I when I am elsewhere and in this room, revisiting pictures…” or “What does / he see as I plunge into his gaze outside language?” In addition, she acknowledges what has no record but is still known. de la Torre writes of what was “Not photographed: trash on the sand. Styrofoam bits, plastics, bottle caps, wrappers. Cigarette butts, masks” and more. The specificity in this list highlights the power of memory, and how recorded knowledge is inherently incomplete. This moment empowers humanity and personhood over technology. de la Torre can conjure what was not recorded because she was there. Someone doing research would first rely on photographs to transport themselves to that beach. de la Torre here is encouraging dialogue, collective memory, and empathy as supplements to flat and incomplete records of life.
de la Torre explores momentum throughout Pause the Document. How does a record of the past affect us in the present? What propels us forward? What does hope for the future look like while moving through difficult times? “A Year and A Day,” a brilliant list poem in the heart of the collection, is an alphabetical catalogue that paints life during lockdown: “An anti-pastoral that forgets to forget that poetry is underwritten by labor,” “Ghostly campuses downtown,” and “No mask, no service.” The fragmented style mirrors the isolation demanded by Covid-19, and the alphabetical categorization indicates a need to order an incredibly disordered reality. Perhaps accessing these details only feels safe within a strict form; poetic structure can aid memory recall by shaping language on the page.
Some entries in the poem include verbs, motion that emphasizes survival amidst the despair. While “Going on being” has a more directly hopeful tone, de la Torre also writes, “There is no out. / There, I’ve said it. / They were all in a pod together.” I paused at these lines at first, stunned by the truth of it: our Earth is home to everyone and we have nowhere to go. de la Torre is offering, however, acknowledgement of connection, that we’re all in this together and can move forward together. Another poem that speaks to momentum and connection during a time of extreme separation is “Movement Phrases,” which starts:
With nothing to look forward to, disorientation ensues. I am not one to
plan my next move standing still. I need to be on my way before I
know where I am going. I think with my fingers, to quote someone
else who’s miles ahead.
Here, the speaker traverses a well-known landscape in an unfamiliar state. Her mind pulls her elsewhere, and she is willing to move without full assuredness that she is going the correct way. As the speaker takes in her surroundings along the walk, memories flood in: “I hear Aura’s perfect-pitch impressions of Nico at a bar in Coney Island / one summer,” “Anne and I at the wine bar on Vernon,” and “Carla and I seeing the Radical Women show / at the Brooklyn Museum.” A place is made up of people. One’s life is made in the places one calls home, whether for decades or just a little while. A place can become a home, somewhere familiar, special, and safe, through the individual people who create reasons to keep going; and this is such a gift, especially during crisis or catastrophic change.
Pause the Document is at its strongest when de la Torre directly speaks to her readers about what is possible when moving between languages—the difficulty and the gifts, in poetry and in life. “Bogotá Notebook” starts with “Mentiría si escribiera que volví intacta” [I would be lying if I wrote that I came back intact], addressing a feeling of completeness but also brokenness. In “Dream Caravan Dream,” a sequence of dreamscapes, de la Torre recalls, “I repeat the poem in Spanish a number of times so I can transcribe it upon waking. / It’s so simple I can’t possibly forget it.” Here, the themes of record, memory, multilingualism, motion, and distance all come together. How fitting, that it’s a dream—something imagined, subconscious, deeply personal, and arguably outside reality—that reminds this speaker of the urgency of knowing. A dream, not a photograph or encyclopedia, gives her the confidence of ritual repetition, through the gift of Spanish, to become one with poetry.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbooks Honey in My Hair. She has won fellowships and awards from Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, the Writers' Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Her writing has found homes in CV2, Gasher, Mom Egg Review, Osmosis, Thrush, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing, and is the Reads Editor at Sundress Publications. She is a cancer survivor.