JAWS
[tiburón]

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Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza

Translated from the Spanish by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier

“Something in my name turns me into a fish under attack,” says Jaws: shark, worker, spectacle. This award-winning poetry collection collapses the distance between sea and office, aquarium and classroom, factory and vacation resort, resumé and body under attack. JAWS is a book about water, breath, and suffocation, about work that disciplines the body, about survival under glass. Through (mis)translation, documentary fragments, and cinematic archive, these poems reveal how capital renders certain lives expendable, human and non-human alike. Fierce, darkly funny, and formally restless, JAWS insists on the shark not as monster, but as mirror... swimming, working, alive and curious about where meaning breaks down across languages, worlds, and personas... and what lurks in the waters between.

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Poetry | Paperback | Bilingual edition
148 pages | ISBN 978-1-945720-43-7
May 21, 2026 | Designed by Mutandis
The publication of this book was made possible thanks to the support of the Poetry Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts

 Praise 

In the Spanish-speaking world, the 1975 summer blockbuster JAWS was not mandíbulas but instead Tiburón, the word for shark, which retained the menacing quality of the summer blockbuster's original title. To Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza’s poet’s ear, however, the word jaw sounds a lot like the word for the self in Spanish: yo. “I am the diver / and in my waters, shark.” Pluralized, things get even slipperier, since here the opposite of synecdoche is slippage, as in the passage from a liquid discourse to discourse on liquidity and liquidation, as in making extinct. The poet and her translators render transitions such as these—within, and to and from, English and Spanish—with careful, generous attunement. The result: lasting surprise.

Fusing lyric with documentary material, playful ventriloquy with scenes of ominous oceanic gloom, Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza has constructed a kind of poetic aquarium that rewrites Hollywood horror within the deep currents of international commerce. Aswim in night terrors and dark foreboding, JAWS circles its prey, quietly sneaking up on readers entranced by the rocking waves of its verse, creatively co-translated by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier. If “to tooth means to cling to the world,” then JAWS takes a big bite out of reality, jumping off the screen and out of its pen, leaving this uncanny literary account in its wake.

Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza is one of Mexico’s most original and intelligent poets, and JAWS is the book with which she threw open the doors of literature, allowing the underwater demons of an entire generation to enter.

JAWS [tiburón] explores the semantic shift that makes the word jaws synonymous with shark in a process of forever genericization. The poet Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza asks us what is lost? “Some beasts have more teeth than others” the poet warns the reader, against making quick judgements that leave only shadows in their wake. Rendered in a translation by Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier that allows for the ebb and tide of multiple linguistic crossings and arrivals, I am thrilled to be taught; to watch this film of a poetry collection with wide-eyed wonder at the natural world and how we make and remake it in our own image.

On June 20, 1975, I had just turned ten and I sat in the movie theater and watched JAWS three times in a row. Then my best friend and I walked to the beach in the dark and dared each other to swim. That’s what this second JAWS is like, too. You will want to read and re-read, you will be drawn to the dark, to the sea, daring yourself to plunge.

A defiant and searing work, JAWS exposes the violence that lives just below the poem’s rippling, piscine surface.

 Author 

Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1982) is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, including Polvo lugar, Datsun, Poesía morosa: Prositas de amor contra el SAT, and JAWS [tiburón] (winner of the Ignacio Manuel Altamirano National Poetry Prize). She is also co-author, with Atahualpa Espinosa Magaña, of the essay collection Poesía y desempleo. She has translated several children's and young adult books from French, most notably Tengo 14 años y no es una buena noticia by Jo Witek. She was a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in the discipline of poetry from 2019 to 2021. She is currently pursuing an Interinstitutional Doctorate in Art and Culture at the University of Guadalajara.


 Translators 

Mexican-Canadian poet and translator Dora Prieto writes from Ohlone land (Oakland, CA), where she is a 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with House of Anansi (April 2027), and she is a member of El Mashup Collective, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary artistic experiments. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Best New Poets 2025, Catapult, Hazlitt, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, and elsewhere. She won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. She is an auntie, a dreamer, a thinker, and a cold ocean swimmer—despite a close encounter with a shark as a kid. ♡☆ @primadora_

Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico ✿ city of eternal Spring ✿ and raised in el Distrito Federal, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier writes and translates from unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Volume and carte blanche. She is part of eclectic artist collectives mim and El Mashup, a programmer at the Vancouver Latin American Film Fest, and co-host of Vivaporú on CiTR 101.9FM. Foodie who shelves books and binds them too. Ocean child. She has felt the presence of a shark stirring nearby waters. Dani has two feisty gorgeous dachshunds, Xoco and Rol. @la.tacodelic