Description
Poetry. Translated by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim. In Luis Chaves's EQUESTRIAN MONUMENTS, the stately figure of a former president, Leon Cortés, is counterbalanced by a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a cross-dresser, a singleton, homunculus, thief, and gardener. Dialogue from The Exorcist coexists alongside lines from the Latin Kyrie, Rex, while sweeping statements about entire generations, continents, and genres find a basis in the most intimate details of home-life. The intersections are uncanny, sometimes hilarious, often sad and unsettling. Chaves's hyper-caffeinated imagination renders each image in this remarkable collection in a way that orients the reader and provides a moment's stasis and clarity before "the waves come and the waves erase it."
Author Bio
Luis Chaves is considered one of the most important contemporary authors in Costa Rica. He has written poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has published, among others, the poetry books Los animales que imaginamos (1997), Chan Marshall (2005) and the anthology La máquina de hacer niebla (2012) As well as 300 páginas (2010, essays), El Mundial 2010 - apuntes (2010, chronicles) and Salvapantallas (2015, novel). He has been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian and Slovenian. In 2011 the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart awarded him the Jean Jacques Rousseau fellowship and in 2012 he received the National Poetry Award (Costa Rica). In 2015 he was at the DAAD artist residency program in Berlin, and a resident for the Institut for Advanced Studies in Nantes in 2017. In 2020 his chronicle Vamos a tocar el agua was selected as Best Book of the Year by Rolling Stone Magazine (Argentina). He lives in Costa Rica.
Author City: SAN JOSE COS