Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Eléna Rivera's UNKNOWNE LAND is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape—a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of historic quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera's writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched—Kathleen Fraser. "This is a poem of and about extremity, and it reiterates poetry's ongoing role as an extreme discourse of beginnings and apocalypses, strophes and catastrophes. Language explodes or implodes between the double pressures of tradition and innovation. The eruptions and earthquakes and tremblings in Unknowne Land are only the most literal manifestation of this tension"—Elizabeth Willis, Poetry Project Newsletter.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Eléna Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris. She is the author of THE PERFORATED MAP (Shearsman Books, 2011), Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), Suggestions at Every Turn (Seeing Eye Books, 2005), UNKNOWNE LAND (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), WALE; OR, THE CORSE (Leave Books, 1995), and a recent pamphlet entitled Disturbances in the Ocean of Air (Phylum Press, 2005). She received a MacDowell Residency fellowship March-April 2005, won first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine International Poetry Competition, and was recently awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. Rivera was recently awarded the 2010 Robert Fagles prize in translation from the National Poetry Series for her project The Rest of the Voyage, a translation of the French poet Bernard Noël, to be published by Greywolf Press late in 2011.
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