The Perforated Map - Softcover

Rivera, Elena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848611609 ISBN 13: 9781848611603

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2011

Synopsis

Who guides us through the unknown? Who offers the keys? In The Perforated Map, Eléna Rivera's guide is language as she attempts to navigate the distances, the disturbances, the suggestions, the mistakes, the perforations. In these poems, language is the map, the matter that fills/affects the body, the organizing principle between the self and the world, and the forms that it gives rise to. The sentence is filled with holes. What is graspable between self and other? Is not all language in transit, moving in gradations of light, between knowing and the fuzzy conveyance shaped by words whose meaning is a matter of further adumbrations? How are we able to communicate our experience? How will understanding be sparked? What message is there for the poet/the reader? That is what is at stake in these poems, finding the word, the specific word, to illuminate the way, the experience of life, this moment, this time, this period of history.

About this title

About the Author

Elena Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris, France. She is the author of Remembrance of Things Plastic (LRL-e Editions, 2010), Mistakes, Accidents and the Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006), and translator of Secret of Breath (Burning Deck Press, 2008) poems by Isabelle Baladine Howald. She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard NoA"l, which will be published by Graywolf Press in November 2011. She was also awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation, and a 2009 Fundacion Valparaiso Poetry Residency in Mojacar, Spain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848611609
• ISBN 13: 9781848611603
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 104