Asymmetries offers a panorama of Peruvian poetry, collecting the work of 16 authors from the second half of the twentieth century. The anthology includes a diversity of voices that visit lyricist, surrealist, colloquial, and Neo-Baroque landscapes.

Asymmetries: Anthology of Peruvian Poetry

Huapaya, Giancarlo

Guillén, Paul

Medina, Cristian

Messerschmidt, Maggie

Cardboard House Press

Book made with a cardboard cover, ivory paper, hand marbling on endpapers, and illustrations by Peruvian artist Ale Wendorff. Limited first edition of 150 copies. Each copy is handcrafted, unique, and numbered. The book is in bilingual in English and Spanish. English translation by US poet and translator Zachary de los Dolores.

Heroin and Other Poems, First Bilingual Edition (English - Spanish)

Leopoldo María Panero

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Ward. Drawings by Lennin Vasquez. The themes of Domingo de Ramos' poetry run the gamut: the complexity of love, the beauty and joy of eroticism, urban violence, alienation, and unsightly depictions of Lima, Peru. The reader journeys along burning sidewalks and through oil-drenched plazas, "red ants carrying bones" belonging to the thousands of people who did not survive Peru's Internal Conflict. De Ramos' poetry blends music, pop art, hybrid chicha, and the Quechua- language Huayno.

China Pop

Literature & Fiction

de Ramos, Domingo

Poetry

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler. "In DIALOGUES WITH MYSELF AND OTHERS, Isaac Goldemberg's language, singularly, both refers to life's great universal themes and does so with remarkable fluidity. The most refined irony and humor dwell therein, acting as a highly effective means of provoking reflection on the human condition, a primary nucleus of meaning in his poetic oeuvre. One of the most original poets of our time, he is endowed with an extraordinary gift with words, and these are placed at the service of a humanism that withstands all tests."—Luis Benítez "Utilizing the technique of collage and decoupage, the poetic voices in these poems experiment with distance and proximity, resembling the work of a photographer's lense, focusing and distorting at will the images before him to bring about new ones hidden within."—Julio Ortega "Isaac Goldemberg's poetry is from the beginning invested in creating meaning. The strength of his poems, the contraction of his images is bedazzling."—Raúl Zurita

Dialogues with Myself and My Others

Goldemberg, Isaac

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Catherine Hammond. "We've been waiting so long, so expectantly for the poetry of Olvido García Valdés to appear in English translations that convey her signal importance to contemporary poetry in Spain and to international literature. She is one of the great ones. García Valdés taps a mode as essential as the Virgilian pastoral. She pressurizes and opens vents in the syntax, inciting eruptions in logic, emphasizing somatic connections between flesh and world. Characteristically, she braids underdetermined phrasal strands, agencies, points of view, and conceptual and emphatically sensual registers. While absence and negation are key themes in her work, the poems can be sharply funny and they come, against the darkness of our times, to assert a convincing spiritual buoyancy. With an ear keenly tuned to García Valdés' complex music, translator Catherine Hammond often leads with the verb in English, tuning to the Spanish and keeping the agency of the verb open, recreating the stripped down and exigent quality of the original, a quality intensified by the Spanish poet's tendency to juxtapose fragments without subordinating one to the other. This is an important book. You'll know that as soon as you begin to read the poems."—Forrest Gander TRANSLATOR BIO: Catherine Hammond has a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University. Poems translated from Olvido García Vald és' collection AND WE WERE ALL ALIVE / Y TODOS ESTÁBAMOS VIVOS appear as a chapbook, House Surrounded by Scaffold, from Mid-American Review. Hammond translated Mexican poet, Carmen Boullosa, in a volume of selected poems which was a finalist in Drunken Boat's book contest. She has also published work from Venezuelan poet, María Auxiliadora Álvarez, and fiction writer, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, from Spain. These translations appear in American Poetry Review, Words without Borders, Hayden's Ferry Review, Field, and many other national magazines. Hammond's own poetry has been anthologized in Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry from University of Arizona Press, in MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, and in Yellow Silk from Warner Books. She has three Pushcart nominations. Hammond lives in Sun Lakes, Arizona, with her husband Troy Morrow.

And We Were All Alive

García Valdés, Olvido

Poetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman. "In CADAVERS, his long poem on the desaparecidos--the disappeared victims of Argentina's military dictatorship--Perlongher does not seek to return their presence or whereabouts to those unnamed, absent corpses, but to restore their corporeity to them. He does so by means of a poetic language that can be as coarse and funny as it is ornate, bringing together such disparate elements as Góngora's Baroque and the neighborhood hair salon, Rubén Darío's Modernismo and Argentine public elementary schools. "Legend has it that Perlongher wrote his poem on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo that would take him into exile from a regime that had paradoxically criminalized him not for his fierce political activism, but for his militant homosexuality. This gorgeous translation by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman retraces Perlongher's journey, and finally brings his great poem to an English-speaking audience."--Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Cadavers

Perlongher, Néstor

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría. "The true heir of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn's protégé, Rodrigo Lira is still considered a cult author in Chile. Halfway between the figure of the madman and the genius, halfway between the myth and the legend, Lira wrote poems that were authentic, weird and precious gems. Owner of a unique style, combining irony, intertextuality, and a sharp sense of humor, Lira was an absolute underground poet, whose work was circulated by hand in thousands of Xerox copies that flooded the most notorious university campuses in Santiago de Chile during Pinochet's dictatorship. Now, for the very first time, his poems are available in English thanks to the bold, delicate and meticulous translation of Rodrigo Olavarría (the only authorized voice of Allen Ginsberg in Spanish) and Thomas Rothe (translator of Jaime Huenún's Fanon City Meu). I don't think there is a way to fully understand contemporary Chilean poetry without having read Rodrigo Lira's exquisite and extravagant poems."--Carlos Soto-Román "Rodrigo Lira's elegance, his disdain, make him off limits for any publisher. The cowardly don't publish the brave."--Roberto Bolaño "Rodrigo Lira's TESTIMONY OF CIRCUMSTANCES is vicious. In it, Lira mocks the literary establishment, depicts life under Pinochet's regime, and narrates his experiences with mental illness. This tour de force poem is densely allusive, parodic, and endlessly playful."--Aditi Machado

Testimony of Circumstances

Lira, Rodrigo

Poetry. California Interest. Latinx Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jose Antonio Villarán. "Omar Pimienta documents what living on either side of a militarized border does to a community, how it distorts, breeding suspicion and lies. Here a father brags he has always crossed using a false ID, never through the desert, and a son crosses easily once he has (or claims to have?) a job building destroyers. Here a guard demands that a woman breastfeed an infant she's carrying to prove that it's hers. Pimienta allows ironies and horrors to speak for themselves -- and they do. Loud and clear."--Rae Armantrout "In ALBUM OF FENCES, Omar Pimienta writes the membranes that thrive between the sensed-real of the culturally residual and the liminally sensed hyper-real of the culturally emergent. His vision isn't of an epiphany variety, but rather is borne of a subtle constructivist process of cultural shiftaramas. Writ large into being are alter-selves that get marked up to what Guillermo Gomez Peña has called, 'the mainstream bizarre.' Nimbly threading History's objects ('nation', 'family', 'selfhood', 'city', 'work world' 'friends'), Pimienta guides us into and out of a Borderland Capture-Zone. The result is a transnational, infra-biographical holography that sets the stage for a lived-life poetics. The creative tension between 'biography' and public myth--is nothing short of dazzling."--Rodrigo Toscano "Pimienta is an alchemist of memory, turning simple snapshots into legends, fathers into brothers, heroes and ghosts. His Tijuana is not a wall but a magic portal."--Mike Davis

Album of Fences

Pimienta, Omar

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Art. Translated by Robin Myers. Illustrated by Carmen Amengual. "Ambitiously and with turbulent energy, Ezequiel Zaidenwerg takes on contemporary history and its uneasy relation to and representation by lyric poetry. Wary of old mythologies, Zaidenwerg nevertheless draws from them and from the bank of international literature to make this downpayment on a ferocious, self-conscious, and activist poetics for the 21st century."--Forrest Gander "Zaidenwerg has a prosody that is both brutal and fragile. Every stroke of his syntax, in fertile tension with the images that accompany his poems, opens up the spectrum of possibility for observing and documenting the fleeting, disjointed, fucked-up world around us."--Valeria Luiselli "Ironic, lucid, fierce, contradictory--in short, fascinating, LYRIC POETRY IS DEAD by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg is one of a kind, a poem that takes the form of a historical chronicle and relays in whisper tones the end of the journey that began with the death of the suitors in the Odyssey and concludes with another death--the death of poetry. This extraordinary and singular book raises up a new language that confirms Ezequiel Zaidenwerg as one of the most unique and captivating poets to have emerged from Latin America in recent times. His poetry is the first to refute the claim laid out in his title: LYRIC POETRY IS DEAD. And that refutation is something not all poets are in a position to make."--Raúl Zurita "Wicked and wise, Zaidenwerg's poems turn a commonplace into an incantation that Robin Myers makes sing--and scream, and spit--in English. The lyric is dead; long live the lyric."--Heather Cleary

Lyric Poetry Is Dead

Zaidenwerg, Ezequiel

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Art. Translated by David Shook. "As a person, Eielson always kept something secret, an intimacy he preserved even beyond the reach of his closest friends. This mysterious depth intrigued and fascinated those who knew him and is a salient feature of his writing, sculpture, and paintings. Perhaps this depth will help ensure that his visual and poetic works endure. Though inseparable from the period in which it was created, Eielson's work deserves to live on and bear witness for future generations to the myths, dreams, miseries, and achievements pertaining to the world in which Eielson both suffered and enjoyed his life."--Mario Vargas Llosa "David Shook's translation of Jorge Eduardo Eielson's ROOM IN ROME rescues an essential voice of contemporary Peruvian poetry. A poet of the world who rebels against national as well as aesthetic borders, Eielson rejects simplistic discords between social and artistic commitment. His poetry heralds the power of words: gathering them, sculpting them, changing them to gunshots."--Katherine Hedeen "Alongside his other Roman collection, Noche oscura del cuerpo, critics consider ROOM IN ROME to be Eielson's masterpiece. The collection displays its author's rare ability to 'knot' together past and present, tradition and novelty, the anguish of modern life and the resplendence of another, serene existence within reach."--Martha Canfield "There was a time when poetry belonged to the world, both the known world and the one beyond knowing. Eielson taught me everything."--Mario Bellatín "Without punctuation or capital letters, the vertical and broken verses of ROOM IN ROME are 'arrows / of rare power / aphrodisiacal and purgative.' Each furious repetition is a nail in our heads. The city 'where the sun urinates' is snatched from its gods and offered to us in the intimate, elusive tone of an exceptional poet and brought to life in English in this long-awaited translation."--Enrique Winter

Room in Rome

Eielson, Jorge Eduardo

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