The Parra family has the rare distinction of producing two major artists in a single generation: Nicanor, impudent antipoet who died only last year, and Violeta, folklorist, singer-songwriter and visual artist, who ended her own life in 1967. I read Victor Herrero...
The poetry of Gabriela Mistral, who won the Nobel Prize in 1945, is very concrete, and generally it’s yoked to the Chilean landscape. Often her protagonists are women: on solitary journeys that might be a pilgrimage or an attempt at flight; stuck in landscapes...
One nice thing about Ben’s work on the Real Pigeons series (Book 4 is out now) is that he and I now notice pigeons much more than we used to. There are lots of different pigeons in America, too – the little brown torcazas, with their feathers like scales,...
I see my grandfather’s bones in frangipani tree branches: incautious in their instinct to share, they loll green tongues of leaf, litter the pavement with blossoms where they are trodden, turn banana-skin brown. I see them floating in saucers, stuck in lapels, a...
This is my translation of Xavier Villaurrutia’s poem “Nocturno de Los Ángeles” from his collection Nostalgia de la muerte. Villaurutia was an important literary figure in Mexico in the years after the Revolution, a member of the contemporáneos along...
7 de noviembre Kentuckis, de Samanta Schweblin, es la novela de moda ahora mismo en Buenos Aires; Schweblin aparece en los diarios y hasta carteleras. Los kentuckis son aparatos imaginarios, una combinación entre Furbies y Tamagotchi: peluches sobre ruedas, con una...
