Books

In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, written by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and translated by Rachel Britton, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.

Chinese writer Yang Licai’s Pee Poems go deep and dark—with deceptive lightness—into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. 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.

Infiltrator or inhabitant? In Treasurer of Piggy Banks, Indian poet Vinod Kumar Shukla sees the world through both lenses at once. All details are local yet canonical, and when inside his lyric mind, we are rooted, and the roots are spreading far and wide. Shukla’s ability to see things through their opposite illuminates what is hardest to comprehend with aphoristic yet surreal clarity, from environmental collapse to the way our own deaths are snug inside our lives.

The Rust of History presents the selected poems of Puerto Rican writer Sotero Rivera Avilés (1933–1994), translated from Spanish by the poet’s grandson, the writer Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. Lyrical, close, and resistant to the ease of closure, these poems cut across time to create a potent poetry of place. Rooted and exploratory, bound to anti-imperialism, the poems unfold and keep unfolding how to the live for and against home.

Chinese writer Yang Licai’s Pee Poems go deep and dark—with deceptive lightness—into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. 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.

Cuban writer Severo Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American writers of the twentieth century. This is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English translation and represents poems from throughout Sarduy’s life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker. David Francis translated the poems from Spanish into an acrobatic English. 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. This collection makes it clear why Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language.

Kulleh Grasi’s poems capture the excited intimacy exploring one’s own beloved country with depth and vision. Grasi leaps between languages, registers, and landscapes to create a multi-dimensional book, and Pauline Fan, in her translations, leaps with him into a detailed, rich English, while finding innovative ways to provide context to a place so rarely read about in English.

In Camouflage, Lupe Gómez renders her mother and her mother tongue, her land and its changes with tender, sharp insight, and Erín Moure brings into English this native language of Galicia in Spain so vividly that we can feel the original breathing beneath the surface.