1. How did you start translating Susana Thénon’s Ova Completa? What drew you to it? I was introduced to Thénon's work by the poet Daniel Durand several years ago, during a humid Buenos Aires winter, when I would visit [...]
Excerpt from Ova Completa by Susana Thénon Translated by Rebekah Smith why is that woman screaming? why is she screaming? why is that woman screaming? don't even try to understand that woman, why is she screaming? don't even [...]
The Dry Season All of it dependent on words. When books burn, even the settings of stars collapse, and slipping from thick palms and fingers, the history of place falls away, a malignant physical appendage. (at this moment a figure [...]
Balance for Aimé Césaire I feel like I look ridiculous in their shoes in their tuxedo in their dickey in their detachable collar in their monocle in their bowler I feel like I look ridiculous with my toes that aren’t [...]
From Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG, November 2020) SUMMER REPORT The no longer trodden, the skirted thyme-carpet. An empty line, aslant the cross-leaved heath. Nothing carried into the windbreak. Again, [...]
In the edition of Cuban poet Regino Pedroso’s El Ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu (1955) that I borrowed from my professor, there is an illustration of a mask. It appears in the prologue, below Regino Pedroso’s signature, an inch-tall [...]
KINGDOM OF CATS I sit in a Roman café, unbearably good looking though nobody seems to notice. I get so lost here. One table over, someone speaks Italian in a masculine voice, and it makes my neck tingle pleasantly. I [...]
rasgueo desnudo o canción nómade para cuerdas y olvidos en la esquina violeta te sabía te pensaba llegando consumido yo venía del temple de la muerte de mi muerte más fresca bien parido de obsidiana lamida por la noche [...]
Deteriorated Fauna THEY WILL RISE UP to their own image, in the waters’ slop, beneath the trees; they will witness nothing but their own eyes growing ever wider as they approach the earth, having spiraled downward [...]
Five Poems by Sotero Rivera Avilés Translated by Raquel Salas Rivera Sotero Rivera Avilés, 1953 On April 28, 1933, my grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés, was born in Añasco, Puerto Rico. Like most Puerto [...]