Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories―and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.
Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

Scaffolding: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 133)

Literature & Fiction

Rivera, Eléna

Poetry

Princeton University Press

A remarkable sequence of sonnets that reflect contemporary daily life in New York City
Scaffolding is a sequence of eighty-two sonnets written over the course of a year, dated and arranged in roughly chronological order, and vividly reflecting life in New York City. In this, her third book of poetry, Eléna Rivera uses the English sonnet as a scaffold to explore daily events, observations, conversations, thoughts, words, and memories―and to reflect on the work of earlier poets and the relationship between life and literature.
Guided by formal and syllabic constraints, the poems become in part an exploration of how form affects content and how other poets have approached the sonnet. The poems, which are very attentive to rhythm and sound, are often in conversation with historical, philosophical, artistic, and literary sources. But at the same time they engage directly with the present moment. Like the construction scaffolding that year after year goes up around buildings all over New York, these poems build on one another and change the way we see what was there before.

United States

Poetry. Lartino/Latina Studies. El‚na Rivera's UNKNOWNE LAND is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape -- a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of historic quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera's writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched -- Kathleen Fraser. El‚na Rivera was awarded the Francis Jaffer Book Award for UNKNOWNE LAND. She is also the author of WALE: OR, THE CORSE, available from SPD.

Unknowne Land

Essays & Correspondence

Kelsey Street Press

Lighting Intuition for Architects

Arts & Photography

Stafford, Jenny

Ohman, Angie

Renfro, Richard

Bernal, Paola

Caraway, Matt

Mazzarri, Silvia

Randal, Sarah

Tuchiya, Fabio

Graphic Design

lulu.com

Winner of the Robert Fagles Prize for contemporary poetry in translationEléna Rivera's translation of Bernard Noël's The Rest of the Voyage is at once original and remarkably faithful―indeed, its originality lies in the care and music the translator has brought to her commitment to follow Noël's forms as closely as possible. Rivera succeeds beautifully in setting the rhythms of the French original into English. The succession of poems has a fluency that becomes as mesmerizing as any mode of transport, for Rivera is remarkably adept at varying the lines, landing with emphasis or muting the effect as she follows the speed and light of Noël's themes. Those themes are no less than a meditation on the traveler's encounter with landscape in the late twentieth century. Noël takes on distant shots and close-ups, moving too quickly to see particulars or so slowly that objects become abstractions, conveying the smells, tastes, and sounds of each location in wholes and parts, reflexively considering what is invisible to a visitor, and meditating on the ancient theme of the voyage of life with great vividness and freshness. Noël is one of the most distinguished living writers in France. Yet Rivera's is the first translation of his poetry into English, and her work thus remedies an unfortunate weakness in English-language letters." ―Susan Stewart, from the introduction

The Rest of the Voyage: Poems (French Edition)

Noël, Bernard

Graywolf Press

Poetry. Women's Studies. EPIC SERIES brings together three long poems by Eléna Rivera previously published in small press limited editions. Gathered here are Wale; or The Corse, UNKNOWNE LAND and The Wait; for Homer's Penelope. These poems delve into the complexities of becoming and into what it means to be from more than one world, where place is continually shifting, where memories, languages and stories are carried and swallowed up by much larger histories--histories of conflict, translocation and injustice. "Eléna Rivera's UNKNOWNE LAND is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape--a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of history quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera's writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched...We are given a contemporary Dantesque work of unique elements held together by spiritual accident and intention--its paradox explored and revealed through the book's architectural underpinnings and entirely unexpected vision."--Kathleen Fraser "... this is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in UNKNOWNE LAND are only the most literal manifestation of this tension."--Elizabeth Willis

Epic Series

Shearsman Books

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