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In her first full-length collection of poems, Object Permanence, Michelle Gil-Montero unveils the elusive debris of daily life in order to invoke, paradoxically, its impermanence. Her emotionally resonant lyric poems summon the liminal world of early motherhood, of early morning, of seasons in transition.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero. A book-length epitaph for her late brother Charlie, Valerie Mejer Caso's EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK is a captivating, startling expression of grief. Following a trail of breadcrumbs, Mejer Caso's poems shift between memories, cities, philosophies, echoes and landscapes of quicksand, oceans, deserts, apocalypse. Featuring photographs by Barry Shapiro, EDINBURGH NOTEBOOK contains a profound archive of cultural history coursing with elliptical, illuminating poems. "Even without being / you are what exists and what does not exist, / the looming night." "The language that emerges is one pierced by the world and by our actions in the world. Const...
Poems.
“A remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity.” —The Washington Post Now in paperback, the bold, genre-defying book that asked: What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster at all but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden? In a riveting mix of fact and poetic license, Laurie Sheck gives us the "monster" in his own words: recalling how he was "made" and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him; pondering the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with Mary's (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates); taking notes on all aspects of human striving--from Gertrude Stein to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind.
Fiction. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero. As a writer and critic of hemispheric influence, María Negroni has drawn from sources as diverse as Lautréamont, Pizarnik, and Ridley Scott's Alien to build a model of art as museo negro--repository of the anti-real, the anti-rational, of resistance itself. Her novel THE ANNUNCIATION, brought into English with perpetual nimbleness by the poet Michelle Gil-Montero, traces the afterlife of a member of a revolutionary cadre who flees Argentina for Rome amid the state violence of the Dirty War. Visited by spectres of the human and artistic companions of her many past lives, the narrator weighs up the costs of both art and politics, of language and violence, of exultation and extinguishment. In an era of extinctions--including the extinction of hope--THE ANNUNCIATION is a darkly radiant work, a nightship cruising the galaxy, packed with unlikely resources for the dispossessed, powered by the refusal-to-comply.
This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with "American" otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition. Unlike works extending Western conceptions of writing or searching for an alleged American ethnopoetics, this book approaches literature as a Western invention and, in turn, seeks out correspondences between traditions
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil- Montero. In this book of lyric critical essays, Argentinian poet and critic María Negroni writes about Gothic works--ranging from Horace Walpole's classic novel The Castle of Otranto to Julia Kristeva's Black Sun to James Cameron's film Aliens--and develops an accumulative, absorbing, transnational theory of politics and aesthetics. In the introduction she writes: I want to share something of that fascinating imaginary, packed with castles and lakes, crypts and laboratories, music boxes and evil gardens, urban ruins and boats like coffins ferrying magnificent dreams. Because in that atmosphere, it is my impression, something crucial materializes: a purely sentimental domain where it is suddenly possible to perceive, under any light, the critical link between childhood and atrocity, art and crime, passion and fear, and the desire for fusion and writing.
The brilliance of Joyelle McSweeney's poems is a given; what remains delightfully open to negotiation are its methodologies and its mien. Is she an earnest relator, using wit and gesture to tell the story faster? Or does she take the piss of her subjects, using perfected skills of mimicry and divination to exploit, spot on, their errant humanities? In her second book McSweeney finds her subjects in the long form; "The Commandrine" is a verse-play that in nine scenes tells the story of sailors Zest, Coast, Ivory, and Irish, and their watery run-in with the Devil. "The Cockatoos Morose" stirs Eliotic grandeur with Stevensian absurdity for a cocktail of delirious observation and rigorous leaps of the sort McSweeney is certain to become famous for. "Crusade-dream flips like a standard. The standard / narrows to a point. And points. / Then it dips like a fern."
Islandia is a masterful, mixed-genre (prose-poetry and verse) literary work, alternating passages that tell of an island race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas; and the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author's own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled -- in present-day New York City. Themes from the two aspects of the work seem to approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition....an extraordinary cycle of poems written in two very different and contrasting forms-the Nordic, masculine, epic style of the prose poems, and the Mediterranean, feminine, mannered, lyric style, of the others. Anne Twitty's translation of this masterful cycle has itself been carried out with great mastery.-Esther Allen
Poetry. 'By dint of / positioning, ' these poems unfold a lyric voice with few certainties but, rather, positionings, juxtapositions, movements across and over, settlings then movements again. Hushed, dense but allowing breath, pared in language, Gil-Montero's poems are multiple in form, taut. They resonate and return, pulse. An excellent début.--Erín Moure Where did these poems come from? I ask myself that question whenever I read them. Michelle Gil-Montero is a conjurer. 'Our belly was the felt rut of Roman road, ' she says, in a voice both ancient and intimate, narrating a story of two lovers that is also, mysteriously, the story of where we all came from and how we love, and live-in ho...