Jorge Canese

Born in Asunción, Paraguay in 1947, Jorge Canese, who also goes by Jorge Kanese, Xorxe Kanexe, and just the initial K, is a microbiologist and a university docent. His books of poetry include Paloma Blanca Paloma Negra (White Dove Black Dove), which was banned on publication in 1982 under the dictatorship that finally fell after thirty-five years in 1989, Kantos del Akantilado (Kliff Songs), Alegrías del Purgatorio (Joys of Purgatory), Indios-go-home, and Venenos (Venoms). Even for Paraguayan speakers of Guarañol, his work—which blends Spanish, Portuguese, and Paraguayan Guaraní alongside a significant percentage of idiolectic vocabulary, grammar, and wordplay—can be difficult to understand. In 2010 he published his most expansive work to date, Las Palabras K (The K Words), an occasionally undecipherable volume that remixes his previous work to even more opaque extremes. He has been jailed, tortured, and exiled, but now resides again in his homeland where, in his own translated words, “he continues to believe in poetry, though not much in what is labeled such in the present day.”