Two Poems
By Jaime Saenz

Translated by Ted Dodson & Kit Schluter

ISBN: 978-0-900575-27-3 | 90 pages | Price: $18 | Release Date: 4/1/2026

“The voice is the temperature.”

This indispensable bilingual edition contains two important poems by Jaime Saenz, Bolivia’s lodestone, lodestar and poèt maudit: “The Cold,” in its complete, landmark translation by the poet Kit Schluter; and “Death at the Very Touch,” never before available in English and translated by the poet Ted Dodson. With Blakean intimacy, these two sequences trace a double path through life and death, a cosmic and compact universal guide.

Praise for Two Poems

The figure of the poet-mystic, derelict-saint, cosmic-mariner, endures for good reason: when you meet them on the page, you already know them. You already know what they say is true. Just so, Jaime Saenz speaks from an impossible yet ultrareal angle of perception, an ecstatic position of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion: absolute cold, degree zero. Line by line, degree by degree, these poems advance into the supercooled heart of things, at once spare, marvelous and exactly correct as a spring branch that finds a way to bend and bear one more drop of ice, as ice finds a way to holds on to itself and bear one more drop of light. Friendly with the dead as with the stars, this song unfurls. Lonely as the metal thread of night.

– Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles



For the great Bolivian poet-mystic Jaime Saenz, the realm of the cold, like the realm of the night, is a place both real and fluidly metaphorical: it is you, reader, and it is the city, the beloved, alcohol, and the unspoken word on our lips. To enter, to break the membrane dividing the cold from the spoken, the agreed-upon and familiar world, you must have a santo y seña, a password, a talisman and faith in the permeability of past and future, death and life, self and other. “To fall into the abyss with you,” Saenz writes, “would be to live the true life.” The poem becomes the password given freely to us, but it comes at a terrific cost to the poet. Kit Schluter has a godly ear and renders Saenz’s genius into revelation in this riveting translation.

– Forrest Gander

About the Author:

Jaime Saenz (b. La Paz, 1921; d. La Paz, 1986) was the preeminent literary voice of twentieth-century Bolivia. An unashamed bisexual and poète maudit non-pareil, Saenz mapped the psychogeography of La Paz as a city animated with the spirits of the Andes and the Andean peoples, magic, and poetry. As maestro to a devoted cadre of young writers, Saenz precipitated a new generation of Bolivian literary production through his nocturnal gatherings, “The Krupp Workshops.” He remains one of South America’s most mystical, controversial, and enduring writers.

About the Translators:

Ted Dodson is the author of An Orange (Pioneer Works / Wonder, 2021). He is a contributing editor for BOMB, an editor-at-large for Futurepoem, and a former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kit Schluter is author of the book of short stories and drawing, Cartoons (City Lights, 2024). Recent translations include books by bruno darío, Copi, Mario Levrero, Olivia Tapiero, and Enrique Vila-Matas. He lives in Mexico with his dog, Xochimilco Mero Centro.