Liliana Ponce - Theory of the Voice and Dream
Liliana Ponce
Theory of the Voice and Dream
Translated from Spanish by
MICHAEL MARTIN SHEA
$22.00
Bilingual Edition
208 pages
May 20, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-33-8
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
LILIANA PONCE (b. 1950) is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She has published five full-length books of poetry in Argentina. A selected volume of her poems was published in Colombia in 2019. She is also a translator of Japanese poetry and drama, and served as editor for an anthology of Japanese Noh theater. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies both in Argentina and internationally, including in the pages of the seminal hemispheric magazine Mandorla: Nueva escritura de las Américas/New Writing from the Americas. She lives in Buenos Aires.
MICHAEL MARTIN SHEA is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. His translation of Liliana Ponce's Diary was published as a bilingual chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse; a second chapbook, Fudekara, was published by Cardboard House Press. Shea is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing. His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, jubilat, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
PRESS
Liliana Ponce
Theory of the Voice and Dream
Translated from Spanish by
MICHAEL MARTIN SHEA
Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self.
For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when “to write today is an emptiness," or when “mouth and voice cannot find each other.” Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, “I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.”
“A bolt of world-opening lightning.” —Cecilia Vicuña
“Writing from ‘the ghostly passage,’ the negative core, Liliana Ponce weaves language into states of sublime condensation, where time churns and dissolves and language remains on the brink of collapse and rebirth. In this luminous translation from Michael Martin Shea, I feel pulled into the endless shaping of sensation, and I look forward to returning again and again.” —Alexis Almeida
“This essential selection of poems by Liliana Ponce is a spiral to step into—a dazzling space of oblique light, distorted distances, wobbly time. Ponce fearlessly stares into the void, where the fragility of existence and the inevitability of transformation are to be mourned and embraced. Shea’s deft, receptive translations join Ponce in rejecting the trap of certainties, of fixities. This is a poetics of the beginning—not as an origin, but as an endless thrust of becoming and undoing; a state of turbulence, dread, and ecstasy, where identity dissolves and reassembles in unknowable ways. Here, we partake in the ‘anarchic joy’ of writing, the pleasure of language as its own revolution.” —Michelle Gil-Montero
“Liliana Ponce reaches for the most elemental things, the ones you can see only under blurry light. Her serial poems are vehicles for traveling toward a more enigmatic dimension of reality. ‘Things happen in other ways / Las cosas suceden de otro modo,’ Ponce affirms. Translator Michael Martin Shea exercises great precision, holding himself to her poetic demand for total honesty. Together Ponce and Shea offer a ‘thinking blue / azul pensante,’ turning each poem from day to its nightly unfolding.” —Kristin Dykstra
“Ponce’s work is, without exaggeration, one of the most personal that has developed in our language in decades.” —Reynaldo Jiménez
“All thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime.” —Joyelle McSweeney
BIOS
LILIANA PONCE (b. 1950) is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She has published five full-length books of poetry in Argentina. A selected volume of her poems was published in Colombia in 2019. She is also a translator of Japanese poetry and drama, and served as editor for an anthology of Japanese Noh theater. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies both in Argentina and internationally, including in the pages of the seminal hemispheric magazine Mandorla: Nueva escritura de las Américas/New Writing from the Americas. She lives in Buenos Aires.
MICHAEL MARTIN SHEA is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. His translation of Liliana Ponce's Diary was published as a bilingual chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse; a second chapbook, Fudekara, was published by Cardboard House Press. Shea is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing. His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, jubilat, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
208 pages
May 20, 2024
ISBN 978-1-954218-33-8
Distributed by Asterism (US) and Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
