Echo of the Park

Description

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Romina Freschi's ECHO OF THE PARK is a philosophical long poem that surveys made spaces, both elevated and debased. In dialogue with First Dream by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Freschi captures fleeting states of grace, such as "ecstasy" and "bliss," and the ensuing gravitational pull of urban life's "imperfect terrain." All urban spaces are interior and exterior, private and public, confining and freeing. Ultimately the park, and the "parkified" speech of the poem, are sites of mourning. Can a former site of political violence be converted into a public green space? Jeannine Marie Pitas's nuanced translation presents Romina Freschi as one of the most singular and startling voices in contemporary Argentine poetry.

"Romina Freschi's ECHO OF THE PARK explores dualities of capture and flight. Held by power, routine, poison, cultivation, gravity's many forms? Her language honors ecstatic break through, a feathered bird named Sor Juana, an interspecies heart, introspective focus, and passage to deep grief, and altogether punctuates turbulence with a rare calm...Read Romina Freschi's poetry: like her work as a publisher, professor, and instigator of cultural conversation, it startles us with vulnerable yet durable language. Be a cloud. A shadow-casting amorphous volume in flight for a short time. Be an ant. A ghost."—Deborah Meadows

"Romina Freschi's ECHO OF THE PARK is one long poem that lets the reader chose whether to wander through the pages or rush from one short line to the next as it moves from the mystical dream world of Sor Juana to fallen Eden of the present, from the contemporary to the eternal, from speech to silence, from the smell of fallen, rotting avocados to the scent of wet cement, as effortlessly as a small finch flits through the sky. In this fluid, masterful translation by Jeannine Pitas, ECHO OF THE PARK is a book to read in one sitting, then read again—slowly savoring each line."—Jesse Lee Kercheval

"The poems of Romina Freschi are a welcome addition to American poetry, where we have a tendency to be isolationist by default. This potent voice from Buenos Aires employs vivid imagery and fierce intellect and sprays candlelight into the cave of what it means to be human, lost between realms, where memory takes many forms—an impossible road, a small basket, a chute we slide down—none of them satisfying. But Freschi's poetry itself engages the mind and ear."—Jeffrey Mcdaniel

"Tracing the language of paradise, Romina Freschi's ECHO OF THE PARK, in Jeannine Marie Pitas' brilliant, searing translation, explores a paradise lost, one never-had, in which the poem traverses various registers of pastoral and urban life and asks the reader to 'inhabit then / imperfect terrain.' Through negation—'There is no nature / in the park'—and accumulation alike, this book explores impermanence in its most entropic and lasting forms, leaving its mark on terrain that pushes through the literary and into its liminal outskirts, settling somewhere between 'the dream and its scar.'"—Alexis Almeida

Reviews

Kelly Egan @ Latin American Literature Today

Author Bio