Luca Messarra’s Poetry of America (2018) is a glitched edition of William Linton’s 1878 American poetry anthology, Poetry of America: Selections from One Hundred American Poets from 1776 to 1876: With an Introductory Review of Colonial Poetry, and Some Specimens of Negro Melody. Linton anthologized primarily white male poets, and his “specimens” of black poetry are unattributed and placed at the very end of the text, specifically after the index of white authors. Under a series of computational transformations, Messarra transformed the text into a postcolonial critique of anglocentric images of America.
As a method of exposing the latent linguistic and encoded noise within both the content and medium, the PDF (obtained through Google Books) was run through Google Translate through the major languages involved in the colonization of the New World, from the original English to Spanish, then Portuguese, French, Dutch, and finally back into English. The result is a polylinguistic, glitchy document that embodies the trauma of the translation process and represents the polyphonic space that is the American hemisphere, while also critiquing Google scanning and translation software.
The first printing was made as an imitation of the original casebound library book. Messarra affixed a call number, due date page, and sensitized strip to the book, then inserted it into UCLA’s Young Research Library. Subsequent copies have been seeded into libraries across the United States, Portugal, and Spain.
Undocumented press 