If you've heard of the Nuyorican Poets Café before, the small but iconic space on East Third Street in the historic Boricua “Loisaida” (the Puerto Rican moniker for Lower East Side, in Manhattan) neighborhood, probably its founding poets Pedro Pietri or Miguel Piñero or its famed poetry slam competitions first come to mind. Karen Jaime's The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida elegantly corrects this long-held equation between Nuyorican and cisgendered, heterosexual, Puerto Rican males by presenting us with a comprehensive archive of queer performers, audiences, politics, and aesthetics within the café’s walls that transcends them and extends globally.The book's captivating title points toward the breadth held in the term Nuyorican. As Jaime explains, Nuyorican was a pejorative term used by island-based Puerto Ricans to describe those with Puerto Rican heritage based in the continental United States. The term was appropriated by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero as a positive descriptor and as the name for the Café and avant-garde artistic movement they would help found. As such, Jaime marks the important distinction between Nuyorican as diasporic and racialized ethnic identity, as cultural movement, and as the space that brought both together—the café as producer and witness of the movement itself. Most important, Jaime resignifies nuyorican (with a lowercase n) as a shared aesthetic produced by the combination of space with racial and sexual difference. The texts, performances, and artists that Jaime studies point to a queer nuyorican aesthetic that is not relegated to isolated queer actors in the downtown scene. She proposes queer as a constitutive and foundational aesthetic that has been there all along: “The Café since its inception functioned as a space for artistic and sexual exploration, experimentation, and the challenging of identitarian fixity” (6).The order of the chapters is a nice progression that goes from locating the temporal origins of the movement as foundational queer—Piñero and Algarín, Jaime notes, “both had relationships, romantic and sexual, with men and women” (6)—to more explicitly queer events and figures that also broaden the geographic scope of Nuyorican. Chapter 1, “Walking Poetry in Loisaida,” discusses the hyper-local origins of the Nuyorican Poets Café in Loisaida, which “functions as the space where orality as Nuyorican cultural expression is used to resist the dominant, profit-driven economic control and power of landlords and real estate developers” (32). I appreciated this analysis of the relation between the experimental art and the radical politics that fueled it, and the way it later evolves into the commercialization of slam poetry that is concomitant with the gentrification of the Lower East Side. The spatial analysis of Loisaida gives way to a reading of Piñero's “walks around his beloved Lower East Side, wherein he is creating and performing at the Café, buying and/or selling drugs, and cruising and hooking up with men,” which “contest the sanitizing impulse of topographical appropriation through gentrification” (37). In this way, Jaime establishes the foundations of nuyorican aesthetic as queer, transgressive, and rooted in the Puerto Rican community of the Lower East Side.From there, Jaime moves toward building an expansive understanding of Nuyorican identity. Chapter 2, “This Is the Remix: Regie Cabico's Filipino Shuffle,” focuses on queer Filipino poet and performer Regie Cabico, who performed at the café in the 1990s. The inclusion of Cabico highlights the point that Nuyorican transcends the ethnic marker, but is experienced by marginalized ethnicities that share a colonial and imperial history with Puerto Rico. Jaime's combined analysis of the written word, orality, gesture, and audience in her reading of Cabico's performance underscores the multidisciplinary contributions of the book. The chapter offers a close reading of Cabico's Filipino Shuffle and the way it weaves together “poetic, comedic, and theatrical interventions that both acknowledge and subsequently deviate from the Nuyorican lineage” (57). In this chapter, Jaime also offers a useful analysis of the relation of spoken word to performed ethnic authenticity and the way strategies such as queer camp serve to complicate such tropes.Chapter 3, “Tens across the Board: The Glam Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café,” focuses on the queering of the traditional poetry slam events the café is most famous for, which were enmeshed with the tradition of voguing balls in New York City. Jaime's documentation of this history, her analysis of the shared modalities between nuyorican queer performance poetry and ball culture, and her autoethnographic analysis of her place in the scene as participant and poet are some of the book's most exciting contributions, both in the form of what Jaime terms an “(auto) poetical-ethnographic account” (93), in the documentation of the event itself, and in its aesthetic and political implications of Glam Slam as simultaneous “acknowledg[ment] and mov[e] away from the Nuyorican lineage and genealogy. The politics involved in the reimagining of poetry slams as poetry drag balls parallels those exhibited in the recodification of the term ‘Nuyorican’ from pejorative to empowering” (90).In the last chapter, “Black Cracker's ‘Chasing Rainbows’: Hip-Hop Minstrelsy, Queer Futurity, and Trans Multiplicity,” Jaime closes her journey through queer Nuyorican aesthetic in its most contemporary and global, with the work of Ellison Glenn/Black Cracker, an African American trans performer currently based in Berlin. Glenn's inclusion in the lineage Jaime traces moves from the archival to the contemporary, from local to global, and from understated modes of queer performance to a Black trans “queer critique of a hip-hop heteromasculine imperative . . . and a trans utopic vision in the making,” offering a “twenty-first-century nuyorican aesthetic” (124). Jaime traces Glenn's career back to the streets of Loisaida and the Nuyorican Café and its influence on Glenn's contemporary video art practice based in Berlin. Similar to that of Regie Cabico, the examination of Glenn shows how nuyorican aesthetic is informed by and informs yet transcends the ethnicity marker of Puerto Rican. The final analysis of Glenn's video art and its complex articulations of trans Afrofuturity close the book with a powerful promise of the political and aesthetic potential of nuyorican art.The Queer Nuyorican is an invaluable contribution to those interested in both the historical and aesthetic developments of nuyorican arts specifically and racialized, queer, and queer experimental poetry and performance more broadly. The interdisciplinary study of the Nuyorican Café, Nuyorican identity, and nuyorican aesthetic brings together methods and conversations that are sometimes fractured because of disciplinary constraints. Jaime's positionality as active participant and community member of the scene she analyzes shows in her careful, engaged reading of texts, and her close reading of her own poem and performance is thrilling. She has opened new ground in the study of Nuyorican cultural expressions, offering us Nuyorican as a sovereign aesthetic that will prove useful in discussing not just Nuyorican but racialized queer experimentation everywhere.