Literature in Translation |
“I laughed in my kingdom and as king I laughed,” “no doubt a rain sleeps in the hand,” “a child shows his hands,” “life looks like you,” “but we / do nothing but follow” & “the world transforms at a rapid pace”
“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”
Poetry |
“Calle del Desengaño, Antigua, Guatamala”
“Someone is burning chaff, / someone is burning garbage, someone / is singing to a radio ranchera. / Animals are crying in a far corral // as they do before an earthquake.”
Lyric Prose |
“At Café Azure”
“Late teenaged serving assistants who could be first trusted to simulate an uptight mathematical rigor without too much cologne on the lunch shift wore blue Oxford cloth shirts with dark blue armpits on the patio in the bright sun moving under umbrellas whenever they could.”
Poetry |
“River Bride”
“There’s a continent inside our bodies / built from the attar of Eve, a small boat in the river / of our veins & a burned-out church at the fourth fold // in the wrist.”
Literature in Translation |
“Translators and Traitors” & “A Writer’s Decalogue”
“Do your best to say things in such a way that the reader will always feel that, deep down, he is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, you. From time to time, he will be more intelligent than you are in earnest; but in order to convey this to him, you will need to be more intelligent than he is.”
Poetry |
“Ode on a Field in Norwich, Vermont”
“We have staked out this grass to save us / from certain death. We crush / our crime-scene-outline backs against it weightfully.”
Poetry |
“Purchase” & “Dragonfly”
“The panties arrived by mail, // flat and overlapping on blue / cardboard like four open-winged birds // on a rectangle of sky.”
Poetry |
“Story Time in Shestakove” & “For the Poets”
“Small groups of children gather / in the colors / of song and tattered flags.”
Essay |
“Medicinal History on the Eve of Our Future”
“Galeano, obsessed with actual facts, concludes about America: insofar as Latin countries remain underdeveloped, it’s because of centuries of looting and exploitation by Europe and the U.S.”
Literature in Translation |
“name,” “darkness like a shadow,” “shadow’s resistance,” “rainy day” & “skylight”
“they say my name was encoded with a disaster / in fact all names are given / and intended to carry blessings or misfortunes”
Poetry |
“Christmas Songs”
“The swimming pool lies under its moldy, canvas top. / Faded poinsettia leaves, brown over white, / struggle into a February that sees / roses bend their necked stems in silent death throes.”
Poetry |
“The God of Love Never Says It’s Complicated“
“Is that where your boyfriend’s body bounced // from the car into a patch of bushes? / You say, I wasn’t even drunk, but blinded, // stated mildly, matter of fact and of record.”
Essay |
“Motherboard”
“… this is the first time I’ve descended into Adelaide at night rather than day. I’m stunned by its squareness, by the rigid lines of its hyper-planned grid system.”
Poetry |
“At Gramma’s House” & “On East 38th Street”
“Peek outside the door to the backyard, / there’s a quad of dead shrubs, cat skeletons, / and nopal cacti a father trims for nopales. / Dead children become sediment, a red moon / hovers over a river.”
Poetry |
“Ode to Teased Hair”
“I spend a lot of money to look this cheap, Dolly Parton twanged / in her white suede mini-skirt and fringed jacket, her lips / a gobsmacking vermillion, her wig teased like a halo in San Marco.”