Description
Poetry. Fiction. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott. Includes a translator's notes by Olivia Lott and an afterword by Kristin Dykstra. Written in the 1990s in Cuba, THE DIRTY TEXT is a book of poems, a book of stories and, most vividly, a book of dreams. As poet Rosa Alcalá writes, Ríos' writings are "indescribable manifestations of a poetics unfastened to mode, genre, or category." In this book, human eyes appear beneath other human eyes, snakes materialize with three heads, and the bodies of loved ones duplicate, disintegrate or speak to ghosts and Gods. It is a book about the possibilities of language and literature to articulate our relationship to the communities we occupy and the communities we imagine, a book that disentangles the lines between our conscious lives and our unconscious lives, what we imagine and what we experience. Ríos writes of the island's east and west cities of Havana and Santiago, but she looks off the island as well, to Mexico, to South America, to Europe, at once evoking and defying the broader, international traditions of surrealist and hallucinatory writing.
Author Bio
Soleida Ríos (b. 1950) is an acclaimed Cuban poet whose work draws from Afro-Cuban traditions as well as writers as diverse as Juan Rulfo and Aimé Cesaire. She has published fourteen books from 1977 to the present, and THE DIRTY TEXT / EL TEXTO SUCIO (Kenning Editions, 2018) is her first book to appear in English. THE DIRTY TEXT received a major literary award from the Alejo Carpentier Foundation, and her 2013 collection Estr¡as won the Nicolás Guillén award. Ríos was also recognized with the National Literary Critics Award in 2014.
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA
Olivia Lott is a translator and scholar of Latin American poetry. Her translations and writing on translation have most recently appeared in The Arkansas International, Brooklyn Rail In Translation, Burning House, Kenyon Review, MAKE Magazine, Reading In Translation, Waxwing, and World Literature Today. She is the translator of Lucía Estrada's KATABASIS (Eulalia, 2020), and co-translator of Soleida Ríos's THE DIRTY TEXT (Kenning Editions, 2018) and the curator of the monthly feature Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog. Lott is ABD in Hispanic Studies and an Olin Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is writing a dissertation on 1960s neo-avant-garde poetics in Latin America.
Author City: USA