Poetry in Spanish and English

Algarabía is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf. An inhabitant of Algarabía, a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home.

Marked by invention, irreverence, and psychogeography, Claudina Domingo’s ‘Tránsito/Transit’–winner of Mexico’s Carlos Pellicer prize–is a kaleidoscopic collection of twenty-four poems intricately entangled with the landscape, language, and history of what we now call Mexico City.

Canícula, which means ‘dog days’ in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America.

‘Las horas imposibles’ harnesses linguistic and visual energy to explore themes of love, migration and violence. The first section of the book incorporates lyric and concrete poetry, and the second section is composed of a long poem. The shifts from lyric to visual are organic and retain and expand the book’s emotional core”– Provided by publisher.

Sweet, surreal, and haunting, these poems examine both the frictions and elusiveness that can occur between self and others. The slowing down of time, the gentle observation of sunlight like ‘golden cookies on the bedspread’ as you lie next to a lover. The feeling of solitude rendering you as small and still as a garbanzo bean, yearning as much for water and light as to continue being left alone…

José Emilio Pacheco’s Selected Poems is a major bilingual retrospective of the poetry of one of Mexico’s foremost writers. Born in 1939, Pacheco achieved recognition early, and while still in his twenties, he was already keeping company with the most important writers of his generation. This edition is edited by George McWhirter of The University of British Columbia, who worked closely with Pacheco himself in choosing the poems and their English translations.

In this groundbreaking collection of poems, José Olivarez explores every kind of love–self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural. Grappling with the contradictions of the American Dream with unflinching humanity, he lays bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.”

Originally published in Spanish in 1967, ‘The great zoo’ is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The ‘animals’ on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others.

The Peruvian poet César Vallejo–one of Latin America’s most famous writers, along with Pablo Neruda–began publishing his poems in 1914 after discovering the works of Walt Whitman, the French symbolists, and the modernist Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Spanning his career up to his early death, this marvelous, new, bilingual selection of poems confirms Robert Hass’s assessment that Vallejo was “one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, a heartbreaking and groundbreaking writer.”

These forty-four prose poems, artful yet accessible, presented in both Spanish and English versions, immerse us in the boy kingdom that the Cuban American poet Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. Obejas captures the universal nature of motherhood while also limning the uniqueness of her queer, multilingual, and multicultural family: the way her elder son looks at her as if she’s ‘dancing with the dead’ when she speaks Spanish; her boys’ preference for mac ‘n’ cheese over tostones; the day one of her sons comes home from school disquieted, then finally spills it: ‘A couple of boys yelled at him: your moms are queer!’ At once intimate and expansive, rendered in vivid and masterful strokes of language, ‘The boy kingdom’ offers a joyful gift to mothers, sons, and readers everywhere.

The vision begins with a river. From this river, you can see a village, marine life, and ancestral rituals. It is here that you recognize origins, and a poison beginning to spread through paradise. Suddenly, a premonition: a wounded animal. The certainty of war cries. What you take with you is what you become, each movement a gamble, a lottery of life that transforms you until this moment, when uncertainty becomes an ally.

[The] English debut by Azerbaijani-born Peruvian poet Álvaro Lasso, ‘United Left’ is an ‘ironic, intimate, and sometimes psychedelic book’ entwining the political history of the 1980s in Peru with the poet’s autobiography. Marked by dark, absurdist humor, these ‘pop’ prose poems grapple with revolution, idealism, and the disintegration of the Leftist coalition Izquierda Unida.