Karmelo C. Iribarren - You’ve Heard This One Before
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Bilingual Edition
224 pages
April 14, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-46-8
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
Karmelo C. Iribarren
You’ve Heard This One Before
Translated from Spanish by
JOHN R. SESGO
You’ve Heard This One Before brings the understated yet piercing irony of Spain’s award-winning “wild poet born in a bar” to English readers for the first time.
Iribarren learned to write poetry while serving drinks and wandering the streets of his native San Sebastián. Influenced by the so-called “dirty realists” of the US (Carver, Bukowski, Fante), he forged his own extreme poetic minimalism. A humble, humorous, and razor-sharp flâneur, “subservient to no one / and never up for sale,” Iribarren weaves the “small incidents” of life into his “tiny epic” whose simple language conceals a consummate art. You’ve Heard This One Before, the first selected volume of Iribarren’s work in English translation, samples from thirteen of his fifteen published collections.
“Karmelo Iribarren is one of Spain’s most remarkable poets writing today. Streetcorners, cafés, bars, and bedrooms are the sites of many of his poems, written in an accessible language that invites the reader in, as though conversing with the poet over a glass of wine in the back corner of a bar—“old words, worn by time … weekday words.” Beneath the irony of his poetry, one perceives a tenderness, sensitivity, and deep humanity. We are fortunate to have John Sesgo’s masterful translations of Iribarren’s poems in this bilingual edition.” — Anthony L. Geist
“Iribarren’s English-language debut reads like bar talk at its most musical, with the mundane moments of life—a plastic bag in the wind, the water under a bridge—made utterly surprising. As a career bartender, Iribarren is always at the party but apart from it. There’s a loneliness in this book that is especially sad since what a good bartender does is make people less lonely.” — Harper Galvin
BIOS
KARMELO C. IRIBARREN was born in San Sebastián, Spain, in 1959. An autodidact, he began writing poetry in his late teens, but never went to university, working instead as a bartender in San Sebastián’s Old Town for more than twenty years. He began publishing his work in the 1990s, but it is only recently that his poems have gained notoriety and an ardent readership in Spain. He has published fifteen collections of poetry, most recently La última del domingo (Last One on Sunday), for which he was awarded the Hermanos Argensola International Poetry Prize.
JOHN R. SESGO writes fiction and translates poetry from Spanish. His work has been published in Copper Nickel,Plume, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and other publications. You’ve Heard This One Before is his first book of translation.
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