Erica Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

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Category Archives: Reading Journal

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Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schlanasky, trans. Christine Lo

June 15, 2013 by Erica Mena

This book caught my eye a few years ago in the Harvard Bookstore. I wasn’t at the time acquiring books, since we’d been moving so much, so I wrote down the title in Evernote on my phone and promptly forgot about it. This spring, as I was trying to clean out some stuff from my phone hoping to squeeze another few months of life out of it, I came across the note and remembered being intrigued by the subtitle: Fifty […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: atlas of remote islands, book arts, cartography, christine lo, judith schlanasky, translation

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Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art

May 15, 2013 by Erica Mena

A beautiful book with excellent reproductions of some of the most interesting works of collage in contemporary art. I found it slightly lacking in context. Though the two essays that were included were interesting they could have been more thoroughly developed. The O’Reilly essay made some really surprising reductions of the development of early twentieth-century collage techniques. Still a lot of good concepts raised – a good introduction for undergraduates beginning to think critically about collage. The second essay posited […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: art of stealing, collage

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Notes on Conceptualisms by Richard Fitterman and Vanessa Place

May 11, 2013 by Erica Mena

Was considering assigning this for The Art of Stealing, but though there are moments that are very interesting, as a whole the book fell short of my hopes. The Fitterman section seemed a little too enamored of its own brilliance, as evidenced by the reliance on fairly obtuse language and a lot of the kind of name-dropping reference that is fine for notational purposes but I think is really a kind of self-satisfied flouting of ones’ own library. Though I […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Teaching • Tags: art of stealing, conceptual writing, manifesto, notes on conceptualisms, richard fitterman, translation

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To Do As Adam Did by Ronald Johnson

May 8, 2013 by Erica Mena

The introduction to this book did exactly what any introduction to a selection of poetry should do: made me very, very excited to discover the poetry within. Contextualizing it in the Olsonian projective verse tradition, and then explaining how Johnson’s work evolved into the world-wide concrete poetry movement, before finally emerging into a “big” poem he imagined in the tradition of A, The Cantos, and The Maximus Poems. I was absolutely enticed, and some of my anxiety (that it was going to be […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: concrete poetry, experimental poetry, long poems, poetry, ronald johnson, to do as adam did

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Fortino Sámano by Virginie Lalucq

April 25, 2013 by Erica Mena

This complicated little book is actually two in one – a poem and an “overflowing” of the poem, a poem and its poetic exegesis. The first section is an ekphrastic poem written by Virginie Laluq and translated by Sylvain Gallais, written in response to a photograph of the Mexican guerilla and counterfeiter moments before his execution by firing squad. I have not seen this photograph (in fact, when I googled it while writing this, the page refused to respond, and asked me several […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Translation • Tags: art, cynthia hogue, ekphrasis, fortino samano, jean-lug nancy, philosophy, poetry, sylvain gallais, translation, virginie lalucq

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Personae by Ezra Pound

April 15, 2013 by Erica Mena

File this under the category of things I shouldn’t say aloud. Opinions I’ve been crucified (metaphorically) for having. I don’t like pie. Or free jazz. I don’t care for The Beatles. Salinger irks me. Not a fan of Junot Diaz. Still trying to figure out what is worth reading in Whitman. And Pound. First section – untitled, “The Tree” to “Au Jardin” “—the thing is banal.” Pound says to Williams of the fourth poem in Personae, and so far as […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: ezra pound, modernism, personae, poetry, reading journal

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Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen

April 14, 2013 by Erica Mena

Language is a tricky thing, any translator will tell you. You think you know it, and then you miss. A mis-heard word, a mis-read phrase. Expectations aroused and thwarted. The work of the poet. This book explores with delight, despair, and demanding the slipperiness of the English language in the American idiom. An abcedarium of intentionally misdirected language, it is playful and political. She employs a range of techniques, from the occasional (and recognizable) N+7 to some far subtler slidings around in […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: experimental poetry, Harryette Mullen, language poetry, prose poetry, reading journal, Sleeping with the Dictionary

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Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

April 1, 2013 by Erica Mena

I don’t read very much fiction nowadays, or at least not very much ‘literary’ fiction, that is, unless I’m translating it. It’s the sad reality of being an overstretched graduate student that I’ve had to narrow my reading down to poetry, contemporary poetry, contemporary innovative poetry, contemporary primarily women’s innovative poetry and even then I have a stack of books I’m unlikely to get through in the next year. Well, sad and exhilarating. But when the advance proof for Mundo Cruel […]

Categories: Reading Journal, Translation • Tags: fiction, luis negron, mundo cruel, puerto rican literature, Puerto Rico, reading journal, seven stories, short stories, suzanne jill levine, translation

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The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

March 22, 2013 by Erica Mena

A strange thing happened to me yesterday while I was finishing The Descent of Alette: I fell asleep. To be fair the carbon monoxide detector had gone off with it’s out-of-battery warning very late the night before, and I have a hard time falling asleep so getting interrupted set me back an hour or two. And it’s been surprisingly cold so I had the heat cranked up and was lying on my bed in front of the space heater where it was warm. […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: alice notley, contemporary epic, descent of alette, epic, erica mena, feminist, narrative poetry, poetry, reading journal

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The Aviary of Voices by Karin Lessing

March 10, 2013 by Erica Mena

What especially interests me about Karin Lessing’s In the Aviary of Voices is that it is exceedingly sparse on the page, and nonetheless has such emotional complexity. The poetic vocabulary Lessing uses seems almost anticipatable. Shadows and nights abound, light and ghosts and stars and heavens, trees, leafs and seeds. A lot of description of night and light. And the love-relationship that exists seems almost too easy (“breath / our breath”, “your / life / branches / to choose among” “in sleep / […]

Categories: Poetry, Reading Journal • Tags: in the aviary of voices, karin lessing, lyric, poetry, reading journal, sentimentality, shearsman books

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