Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes everything for you, that throws open the door of possibility, breaks off the hinges, and demolishes the doorframe altogether, leaving a gaping hole in the Wall of What You Thought Was Possible. To my list, I definitively can now add Emilio Carrero’s Autobiography of the [Undead] (Calamari Press, 2025).
The project of the book starts out simply. He writes,
“I had wanted to write about who I was, who
I’d been, in the service of an author I might become…
I thought that autobiographyinc. guaranteed a way to write about the past, the necessary means
I took to corral my wants∞ into a printed grave.” (Carrero, 7)
What ensues is a book that is part poetry, epistolary memoir, collage, and philosophical treatise.
One noticeable aspect of the book is the quick proliferation of citations. The main text of Autobiography is about 120 pages long; flipping to the back of the book, you’ll find an additional 30 pages of citations. They range from the Iliad to Pornhub, Donald Trump to Justin Torres. Carrero also cites old work of his own, personal letters, conversations with others, and conversations with himself. All told, the number adds up to just over 700 citations. On page 40, we get a thrilling passage that provides an answer as to why Carrero employs this strategy.
The abstract passage, taken from a text by French linguist/philosopher Jacques Derrida, includes Carrero’s own words liberally inserted within via brackets, a technique that is used throughout the entire book. Here he addresses assumptions about autobiography and rejects them, specifically the need of an author to “[…bury (or cite) themselves, to say what they mean]…But the sign[ifier] [undead] possesses the characteristic of being readable [wanting more than autobiography’sinc. burial plot©]” (Carrero, 40). This is, essentially, the animating emotion behind Autobiography. To write about the past is to cite your own history, but a citation implies a settled origin. Something finished. Done. Dead, even. But what if the past cannot be moved on from? Can it really ever be? What if it is unresolved, and its implications and sensations linger? This is what Carrero calls the [undead]—those moments, or people, or memories, that haunt you. Even if they are in the past, they have not passed on, much like a ghost with unfinished business.
Carrero continually refers to the book as a “graveyard,” a place where spirits wander about and epitaphs still ring true. He rejects traditional autobiography as a “burial plot”—a conceit that assumes authority over and a rigid definition of the past, identity, trauma, and language. Carrero’s project is something far more dynamic, an attempt to both disentangle those terms and more fully experience the richness of their inextricability. By composing whole sections of his book from citations—but uprooting them entirely from their original context, and filling them with words of his own—he is subverting the practice of citation and its supposed stability. His work becomes a mosaic of sources and origins that, in the end, is something all his own. Which sounds a lot like selfhood, doesn’t it?
My favorite portions of the book are the ones that, at first, appear more straightforward, simply Carrero’s prose. But he breaks these open too, offering multiple ways of reading and endless combinations of interpretation. Whole paragraphs are struck through, though embedded within these are sentences that are not. For example:
“Years later, I would realized that I was [and always have been] unrecognizable to [you] too. With a belt in [your] hand, [you] had asked me: ‘Quieres otro?’ Do you want another one? Another beating? [Maybe this memory is wrong, misleading, always incomplete.] Maybe [you] had thought I was [your] son, my uncle, who [you] used to beat mercilessly into the carpet floor.” (Carrero, 35)
Upon reading, I asked myself: Why does Carrero cross out his own interpretation of events? Why does he leave the evidence of their consideration? In keeping with the theme of the [undead], it’s clear how he draws attention to the ways that the past, and our emotional entanglements with it, cannot be erased. Or, if they can, the ways that they persist, or change. What does remain unchanged is the trauma itself. I haven’t read a better representation of memory.
Carrero turns other sections that would be prosaic into verse. There are letters that are actually redacted, and we are left with only snippets of text coming through. Take this moment:
“but I also think it can ground us in certain ways of thinking, making the writing stale, desperate,
overcooked. I came across this quote from William James the other day who said: A great many
people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudice. I love this and I
think this applies to creative writing. Or at least it does to me. There have been too many times
to count where I thought I was being creative when I was simply rearranging my preconceived
ideas about creativity .
Okay, I should say stuff about me. I’m actually in a PhD program now, which is why I am back
in Florida. It’s for creative writing. I like the city I am in, Tallahasse — it’s a very lush and hilly
town , which I have never lived in before[,] . There are towering old oak trees with Spanish moss
hanging from them. It’s all very gothic looking.” (Carrero, 111)
The simplicity of this sentence, couched in a stupefyingly complex work of erasure, is intoxicating to me. I can see that town in my mind, smell its oak trees. It comes towards the end of the book, where Carrero is moving towards hard earned peace. Throughout Autobiography, he is continually working through the way colonialism has impacted identity and desire on a personal level. With the help of Wittgenstein, he demands “an accounting with [and beyond] all three [four] cultures [that I / come from]—[W]hite, Mexican, Indian [Black, Taino, Hispanic]” (Carrero, 84). He rejects one label after another, rejecting legibility all together, evoking the Foucauldian axiom that the ability to truly know someone requires an exertion of control over them, is its own type of violence. The radical idea Carrero’s work seems to suggest is: what if even attempting to know the self, to make yourself legible, is a form of self-harm? He writes, “I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face[lessness],” (Carrero, 84). Maybe it is, at least with existing labels and genres, fraught as they are with hierarchy.
This extends even to artistic expression. Carrero confesses later on, “[as I] was actually paid for my labor, I found myself / shying away from the thing I had been working [so hard] toward” (Carrero, 119). By all accounts, it appears that Autobiography of the [Undead] is this thing, or at least, an honest, heartrending, and dazzling attempt. Which is to say, it was a labor of love. But not a love that seeks to protect, or domineer, or even know: this is the kind of love that accepts the unbridled, the unresolved, and lets the [undead] speak.
Autobiography of the [Undead] is available from Calamari Press
Joseph Norris graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in May of 2025. He has had short stories and poems published in Gauge magazine, Emerson Green Mag, and won the Humans of the World Summer Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California with his girlfriend Macie and their cat, Dory, and is learning how to play the guitar and the banjolin.
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