Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Orlando Ricardo Menes. "A large portrait of Alfonsina Storni now hangs on a wall of a new hall honoring Argentine women next to the balcony where Evita and Juan Domingo Peron used to deliver their fiery speeches in the Casa Rosada, the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires. The intelligent introduction and the very effective English versions of representative poems in MY HEART FLOODED WITH WATER, translated by Orlando Ricardo Menes, make available in English the life, works, dreams, nightmares, and death of a poet who left an enduring mark in Latin American letters. This bilingual volume constitutes a real portrait and a true homage to a deserving world poet. Readers and poets everywhere without any doubt would treasure and revisit many times this gift granted to us all by Orlando Ricardo Menes' talent"--Francisco X. Alarcon.

Author City: Buenos Aires ARG

Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938) is considered one of the most prominent voices in Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, and among women poets, second only, perhaps, to the Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral. From the start of her literary career Storni raised eyebrows for her controversial feminism, her indomitable honesty, and her barbed wit. Indeed she took on the role of enfant terrible with gusto, displaying a gleeful propensity for mockery and impish behavior. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Storni was undoubtedly an established poet of considerable prestige and immense popularity. Her readings were attended by hundreds of adoring fans who not only purchased her books but also learned her poems by heart. She was a literary phenomenon most comparable perhaps to the American Edna St. Millay, with whom she shared, among other things, an urbane irony and a defiant yet ludic feminism. In 1935 Storni was unfortunately diagnosed with cancer. Her summers were spent on the seashore of Mar de Plata, an inspirational setting for many of her nature poems of this period. Though she was surely haunted by the specter of death, Storni galvanized the discipline and will to complete her last book of poems which many critics judged to be her crowning achievement, Mascarilla y trebol (Mask and Clover), published shortly before her suicide.

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