Rain of the Future
by Valerie Mejer
Edited by C.D. Wright. Translated by A.S. Zelman-Doring, Forrest Gander, and C.D. Wright. Forward by Raúl Zurita translated by Sarah Denaci and Forrest Gander.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies.
ISBN: 9780989804806
1 February 2014
$16
“Welcome to Valerie Mejer’s phantasmagoria. In the back of the poet’s mind, Bachelard may be the touchstone. In the reader’s, it could be Bosch.”
– C.D. Wright
“Andre Breton famously wrote ‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’ — Mejer convulses steady as a beating heart.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Valerie Mejer keeps writing poems that, in their disconsolate perplexity, disclose a sweeping prospect in which biography, landscape, memory and dream erase their respective margins, making clear to us that what we come to call existence is simply a modality in which we claim our right to weakness, defeat, hemorrhage, because only through radical vulnerably can the urgency of love arise.”
– Raúl Zurita
REVIEWS
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Painter and poet Valerie Mejer was born in Mexico City. Her poems explore containment and fragility, layering loss and possibility over a once-familiar landscape. She is the author of the poetry collections Rain of the Future (2013), translated by C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, and Alexandra Zelman; de la ola, el atajo (2009); Geografías de Niebla (2008); Esta Novela Azul (2004), which was translated by Michelle Gil-Montero as This Blue Novel (2013); and Ante el Ojo de Cíclope (1999). Her book De Elefante a Elefante (1997) won the Spanish Government’s “Gerardo Diego 1966” International Award. Her etchings appear in Raúl Zurita’s Los Boteros de la Noche (2010), and her paintings appear in Forrest Gander’s Ligaduras/Ligatures (2012) and in Antonio Prete’s Menhir (2007) and L’imperfection de la Lune (2007). Mejer is also the recipient of two CONACULTA grants as well as a grant from Sistema Estatal de Creadores for her translations of Australian poet Les Murray’s work.