Straddling the line between fiction and poetry, Empire of Dreams speaks of Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi's love affair with New York City--her imagined social, political, erotic, and linguistic relationships to the place that has acted as a magnet to Puerto Ricans for so many years.
The work deals with issues of performance, gender ambiguity, and marginality. It is concerned with the boundaries of language and the possibilities of cross-dressing poetry as commercials, diary, tabloids, gossip, confessions, videos, autobiography, musicals, and manifesto. Characters turn into...