trillos / precipicios / concurrencias - pathways / precipices / spectators

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Randall. Edited by Susan Gardner. "In these poems we accompany the man to distant cities and into his own island history. His lines are crafted in layers of looking, listening, feeling. Wild surges of breath are reigned in with just the right degree of control, so that these pathways and precipices rarely lead where the reader expects." —Margret Randall

"In the hyper-velocity of the monolingual poetic fashion of the United States and of social networking, there is a tendency to forget that poetry is human, and that the traditions to be drawn from in it are human and might involve emotions that derive from the echo of forgotten or once remembered music. Reading the poetry of Alfredo Zaldívar I found myself in a zone too rarely encountered these days, a zone in which the poet is reserved and allows the senses to finish the sentence, allows the unsaid to suggest the other registers not yet hinted at. Long known for his role as founder of an extraordinary handmade book collective, as well as head of a major publishing house, in Margaret Randall's intimately focused translations we finally have a chance to encounter Alfredo Zaldívar, the human poet." —Ammiel Alcalay

"This dynamic, moving volume is a welcome addition to the rich trove of Latin American poetry in translation." —Electa Arenal