Poetry. Women's Studies. Translation. Translated by Erín Moure. CAMOUFLAGE is a new collection of poems by the Galician poet and journalist Lupe Gómez. The poems in CAMOUFLAGE are sharp, tender elegies for a mother and for a rural village, its changing walks and ways and words. In CAMOUFLAGE, we see how one person can be "two sisters," with "two pasts." We learn about making cheeses, but also that "Death is a political project." Gómez's bold voice erases the line between the political and the domestic, the experimental and the sequential, and allows for celebratory insight. CAMOUFLAGE was published in Spain in 2017 and is Gómez's eleventh book of poetry but her first published in the United States. The poems were originally written in Galician, a language spoken by about 3 million people, primarily in Galicia, an "autonomous community" in the northwest of Spain. Translator and poet Erín Moure has translated the book into an intimate English with a vivid and tight "linguistic embrace." CAMOUFLAGE is a bilingual edition with a translator's introduction, and presents a new approach to designing work in translation.

Camouflage

Literature & Fiction

Gomez, Lupe

Poetry

Circumference Books

About the Author\nNovelist, poet, painter, and literary theorist, Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1937, he moved to Havana in 1956 to study medicine, but soon gave up his scientific pursuits for the arts. Often homoerotic and imbued with allusions to art, the absent or decaying body, the history of science, jazz and folk music, and the author's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage, Sarduy's poetry has rarely appeared in translation, but his literary oeuvre was vast. Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. Richard Howard hailed Sarduy as a writer who "has everything...so brilliant, so funny, and so bewilderingly apt in his borrowings, his derivations, as well as in his inventions." Sarduy's neo-baroque style influenced such Spanish-language novelists as Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo, and Carlos Fuentes. From 1960 until the time of his death, the poet lived in Paris where he worked with Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and many others, on the literary magazine Tel Quel. Sarduy died due to complications with AIDS in 1993. Severo is the author of BEACH BIRDS (Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2007) and FOOTWORK: SELECTED POEMS (Circumference Books, 2021).\nPoetry. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Cuban Studies. Translated by David Francis. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American literary figures of the 20th-Century. His poems are acrobatic in content and form, innovative, and also part of a deep lineage and web of connection. David Francis translated the poems from Spanish into a gripping English. He writes, FOOTWORK is "a body of work that sings on its own, that celebrates the carnal life, the sensual experiences of dance, of painting, food, music, and sexual pleasure, but that also recognizes --in these pleasures --the imminence of one's passing." 
Although Sarduy's novels have been translated into English and received praise from such writers as Roland Barthes, Richard Howard, and James McCourt, this is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English translation. FOOTWORK represents work from throughout Sarduy's life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker. 
Sarduy invents new forms to engage questions of identity, specifically how his own and Cuba's Spanish, African, and Chinese heritage is intrinsically intertwined with Cuba's history of slavery and indentured labor. As Francis writes, "Severo Sarduy was not known to follow convention. Nor did he think that conventional approaches to storytelling or lyrical composition could capture the complexities of human behavior or personal and national identity." The title, FOOTWORK, "recognizes how Sarduy's poems deliver devastating wit, which lands on its prototypical feet or adroitly maneuvers, purposefully, around naming objects, people, or body parts and toward unexpected endings," writes Francis. The poetry in FOOTWORK makes it clear why Gabriel GarcÃa MÃ¡rquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language. 
"Baroque, yes, as we expect from the great Severo Sarduy: but these poems are also severe, mathematical, futurist, neoclassical, occasional, private, courtly, and lubricated. Some of the poems come from the heady world of poststructuralism, but most come from a Caravaggio-like sepulchral grotto, where a lush and explicit eroticism meets up with the sculpted and the shaped. Fixity is everywhere in this volume: fate fixes Sarduy, just as the seam between sex and language fixates his verse. David Francis's translations are a labor of love, executed with ingenuity and a voluptuary fineness." --Wayne Koestenbaum\nBook Description\nGroundbreaking poetry from Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, who Gabriel GarcÃa MÃ¡rquez called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language.

Footwork: Selected Poems

SARDUY, Severo

David Francis (Translator)

Translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu. Chinese writer Lao Yang's PEE POEMS go deep and dark--with deceptive lightness--into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English. 
PEE POEMS is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In PEE POEMS vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined. 
Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak. 
"In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny."--Ken Chen 
"In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection."--Ha Jin 
"Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return."--Rob Mazurek 
"These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay."--Eileen Myles 
"These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously."--Zhang Er 
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.

Pee Poems

Yang, Lao

The Rust of History

Avilés, Sotero Rivera

Treasurer of Piggy Banks

Krishna Mehrotra, Arvind

Kumar Shukla, Vinod

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