Octavio José Oliverio Girondo (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1891 / Buenos Aires, 1967), known as Oliverio Girondo, born in the same decade as Alfonsina Storni and Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most noteworthy Argentine poets of the 20th Century. He was a key figure in the twentieth century Bonaerense avant-garde, specifically he was part of the Grupo Florida that worked together on the literary journal Martín Fierro. He was a poet of modernity, big cities, travel, technology, and modern alienation who always strove to renew poetry and find new modes of expression. He experimented with form and language itself and sought ways to sing about the mundane modern world in lyrical language. Huidobro, Vallejo, and Girondo push language to its very limits, its disintegration. His collections of poems are: Twenty Poems to Be Read on a Streetcar (1922), Decals (1925), Scarecrow (Within Everyone’s Reach) (1932), Persuasion of Days (1942), Our Countryside (1946), and In the Moremarrow (1952).
Author: Oliverio Girondo
Translator: Jeremy Paden
Skillfully handling all the challenges of a poet open to sharing the suffering of humanity, Javier Gutiérrez Lozano has reworked politically and ethically engaged poetry to turn it into a furious song that demands justice. This book, whose first edition came out in the United States and England, make this Mexican poet the most international of his generation.
The reader will find in these poems the depravity of a decadent world consumed by violence. All poetry can do is get up and defend the existence of moral goodness, a virtue that daily suffers disparagement.
Gutiérrez Lozano's daring not only shows his courage, but also the kind of taking on of the suffering of others that only great writers are capable of doing.
Fernando Valverde
Author: Javier Gutiérrez Lozano
Translator: Jeremy Paden
I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
Tomás Bravo Hepp’s newest book Family Tree: Nano Diagrams uses the logic of the genealogist to build a family story and a self-portrait of lyrical fragments collected from the past. While the psychological drama of the book is that of the domestic sphere, of parents and children across generations, the poems take the arboreal metaphor of a family tree quite literally. The book is something of a wunderkammer that collects references to a variety of austral trees and windswept, rain-soaked landscapes. Near the middle of the book, in a rare two line poem, Bravo Hepp writes, “We will all be / Seafloor.” This verse reminds us that even as trees grow upward, things fall down, fall apart, and settle to the bottom. This sedimentary process, however, slowly builds the world and makes new stone. Reading is also iterative and accretive. These Nano diagrams play with the logic of reading. They are built up through a layering of fragments. Poems unfold over multiple pages as new stanzas are added from page to page. Connective arrows show the relationship between the stanzas. At the end of the poem, after multiple readings of early stanzas, we arrive at the end, a completed diagram, a gestalt where the title finally comes as a moment of insight. Bravo Hepp, at once, exploits the backward glance of the genealogist and the psychoanalyst even as he makes patent through the layout of the poems the relationship between reading and understanding. Namely, that understanding, like a tree, grows overtime.
Author: Tomás Bravo Hepp
Translator: Jeremy Paden
Elí Urbina, one of the most relevant Peruvian poets of the newer generations, both for his poetry and for his work in cultural management, offers with Exŏdus a second installment of his poetics of a decidedly anthropological nature. Now he does not look into the specular abyss of man, but speaks to us of and from his port of Chimbote, for which his literary avatar imagines himself as an Odysseus from a renewed South-American Ithaca. Urbina is perhaps the one who best reminds us, for the future, of those metaverses of Vallejo that have penetrated more deeply into the human.
Luis Correa-Díaz
University of Georgia-USA
Academia Chilena de la Lengua
Real Academia de Ciencias, Letras y Artes
de Córdoba, España
Author: Elí Urbina
Translator: Jeremy Paden
The Correspondences is a collection of urban poems set in Istanbul and Florence, New York City and Buenos Aires, the outskirts of Bogotá and Sarajevo. These poems are palimpsests that layer personal and historical memory over each other. They weave together contemporary Mexican vernacular with literary Spanish of the Barroco and Modernismo, the Spanish of the conquistadors with modern sensationalist journalism. They are poems of love and death, that reference Dante, Petrarch and Ibn al-Ahnaf, and also text messages, ultrasounds, social media, billboard advertisements and graffiti. This is a series of letter send by a poet by a journey into language as he seeks to bring together, the private world Confessionalist poetry with the public world of the poetry of witness.
Author: Alí Calderón
Translator: Jeremy Paden
