“These loins aren’t on fire”: Neoliberalism and the Erotic in Paul Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him

In My Kill Adore Him, Mexican American poet Paul Martinez Pompa uses the realm of sexuality as a lens through which to explore the ideological, social, and affective shifts that have accompanied the rise of late capitalism in the U.S. In these poems, Martinez Pompa implies that our experience of neoliberalism has resulted in our affective withdrawal from politics, which he allegorizes as a decline in our libidos, as well as a distancing from what Slavoj Žižek describes as the Real of the body and a distortion in the way that we perceive suffering in the rest of the world.