Bruna Dantas Lobato: Blue Light Hours
“Blue Light Hours is a melancholy, strange, and love-suffused book, exploring a relationship through a medium that connected families around the world long before the Zoom era. Through Skype, a mother and daughter a continent apart create a dreamlike, almost womblike space, wrestling an uncanny closeness from a distance of thousands of miles. A quietly beautiful coming-of-age story that never loses sight of the people who come along—or don’t—for the transformation wrought by time and distance.” —Lydia Kiesling
Fátima Vélez: Jardín en Tierra Fría
This novel tells the story of twenty-four hours in the life of Primera V, caretaker of the garden in Tierra Fría that Papá V has built for years with plants brought from distant lands and ruins of colonial palaces. She suspects that the father wants a garden of daughters to serve him, and that he has buried their mothers there. She also suspects that her boyfriend and his best friend are having a love affair: she thinks she has heard them together in the shower. Amid the scarce water and murky air of Tierra Fría, sisters, doubts, and doubles coexist.
Natalia Litvinova: Luciérnaga
“Luciérnaga (Premio Lumen de Novela, 2024), like all good books, puts forward contradictions: it’s luminous, but it speaks of dark times; it’s simple in its manner of displaying the complexity of the world in which we live; it’s tender in its hardness; anchored in reality, but mythical all at once; it speaks of the loss of a country and the recovery of another; of what it means to grow up and also to grow old; it’s easy to read, but then it lingers within us, ringing on.” —Clara Obligado
Alfredo Baranda: Sinfonía inacabada
Daniel has died and ascended to Heaven. His arrival coincides with a moment at which significant changes are taking place in the structures of Paradise. God has decided to abdicate His celestial throne in favor of his son Jesus Christ, and Daniel happens to witness firsthand the enthronement ceremony of the new king. From this moment on, things happen with dizzying speed, and Daniel bears witness, perplexed and disoriented, to the surprising changes that are being made in Heaven. As a newcomer, he must wait a few months to receive his Certificate of Full Celestial Citizenship, which is essential for him to be assigned the individual dwelling in which he is to live for eternity. Despite finding himself in the Readaptation Period and not yet having acquired the “glorious body” that will give him access to all the privileges the blessed enjoy, Daniel starts an inquiry to gauge the opinions of the heavenly residents he finds most notable. This book, besides the chronicle of this investigation, is the story of the feelings that flood through him throughout it.
Federico Díaz Granados: Grietas de la luz
“This poetry collection sifts through the timelessness, the placelessness of those who forget, and through the pain of those they impotently accompany. Reading it brings pain, but also helps frighten off the frights of those who remember. As long as poets exist, there is a place for us in poetry’s embrace. To settle between the Grietas de la luz of Federico Díaz Granados is to put oneself in the place of others and of oneself, and to appreciate the value of memory and the infinite happiness of knowing, positively, that tomorrow, when we see the stars, we will remember Mars is a red planet, and our family’s faces have first and last names and take up a place in our world. To read this book is to cry over oblivion and, at once, to celebrate the joy of a life shared.” —Tatiana Duplat Ayala
Cayre Alfaro Fonseca: Quince minutos de receso
“Once upon a time, most verse collections by young poets were strong aesthetic statements, incendiary manifestos. Some were declarations of war. Then came a time when, to merely remind us it was still there, poetry appeared in little booklets that were anthologic, tea parties of alliteration, with the intense, coquettish gaze of the aspiring philologist. The elders warned me this was the succession of literary history in eternal return, like in One Hundred Years of Solitude and that poem about Giordano Bruno. Perhaps it is. Rarely do I read a poetry collection with such a strong and coherent poetic grounding, and verse compositions so austere and concise, that it does not resemble a contrived statement or a text hyper-edited ad nauseam. But Cayre Alfaro Fonseca’s Quince minutos de receso is direct, it’s easy (while being truly meticulous, while being almost always an ars poetica).” —Alexis Iparraguirre
Diego Roel: Los cuadernos perdidos de Robert Walser
“On the recommendation of my friend, author Ramón Bascuñana, I got my hands on the new winner of the Loewe Poetry Prize, Los cuadernos perdidos de Robert Walser. You immediately recognize a voice that operates in a well shaped, solid code of style and symbols. This is a poetry book of consummation, more than initiation—no doubt about it. Entrusting his poetics to what might be some notebooks by Robert Walser, Diego Roel delves into the prophetic nature the word expresses when the author adopts the role of the bard, tending to decipher (in the landscape) vestiges of another language—one much more tempting with regards to expanding questions and finding answers that do not always conform with the certainties of rationality.” —Manuel García Pérez
Bastián Desidel Escurra: Los fuegos abandonados
“The verses brought together here confess a disconcerting certainty: Poetry continues to dwell in words, in the angular cipher of letters. Even in the shadow of shadow, even in the fragment written long ago by a hand long since dead, Bastián Desidel reunites found images and convenes them in his writing, leading them to coexist as he succeeds in renewing the gaze of those who peer over his words. The unflagging reader expands his task to include writing itself; he becomes a creator, a poet. This text, concise and precise, is not the portrait of a shipwreck, but rather that of a rescue of images that prop up our ruins: a caveat to any dead vocable, fires—albeit abandoned—that still shed light. May these diminutive verses be the reflection of an ambitious endeavor amply achieved: that of returning to language its poetic, evocative, and permanent law. May these verses be the architecture of a speech that affirms, with its language, human and poetic experience.” —Víctor Campos D.
Federico Falco, tr. Jennifer Croft: The Plains
“In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,” our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade. So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.
Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Robin Myers & Sarah Booker: Death Takes Me
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.
Gabriela Aguirre, tr. Laura Cesarco Eglin: The Mistaken Place of Things
“These kaleidoscopic poems traverse reality and its other sides. A body on a hospital bed or a paraglider. A border city or a womb. An old photograph or a hallucination. This is a poetics of estrangement, where the body is ‘the only staircase available,’ ‘the window through which things happen,’ a place of disease. Gabriela Aguirre and Laura Cesarco Eglin speak to us from every angle. These are poems to be read aloud, so that you can feel the words as they leave your skin.” —Olivia Lott
Mirtha Dermisache & Sergio Chejfec, tr. Rebekah Smith & Silvina López Medin: The Month of the Flies
The Month of the Flies is Sergio Chejfec’s response to Mirtha Dermisache’s Book N ° 8: 1970. Here Dermisache’s book functions as the “original” from which Sergio Chejfec’s poetic text takes shape. Chejfec’s lines are dynamic, occupying the same space as each of Dermisache’s lines, as if using language to approach her visual frequencies. The spreads appear to establish a relationship of original and “translation,” but the project pushes against this reading, exposing the cracks in the legibility of such a “translation,” which, in its relation to Dernisache’s own “illegible writing,” could in fact be nearly anything else. This text, Chefjec writes, is something of an “arbitrary sequel” to a text which “both demands to be read, yet remains silent.”
Marcelo Morales, tr. Kristin Dykstra: The Star-Spangled Brand
The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, translated by Kristin Dykstra, is a collection of prose poetry which tracks a city that changes—unless it does not. He began the book’s composition during the 2010s with a long poem, “The Swan II,” reflecting on everyday life and history in Havana. At the time, the world viewed Cuba as undergoing profound transformation. The end of this decade involved more large-scale shifts and conflicts, many driven by north/south relations. How would new events sculpt spaces around the love, fear, and needs of one single citizen?
Dagoberto Gilb: New Testaments: Stories
Dagoberto Gilb’s latest cast of characters includes a young family whose exposure to a mysterious cloud of gas alters their lives forever; a high school dropout whose choice to learn the ways of the world from the adults at work leads him into a dangerous dalliance; a former high-rise carpenter who meets up with an eager old flame; an aging Chicano, living alone, whose children watch over him for signs of decline; and more. Gilb’s distinct narrative voice offers his readers a warm welcome as he peels back the surface of everyday life to seamlessly guide us into realms of myth and fable.
