E. Rowan Mena

Poet | Book Artist | Translator

Main menu

Skip to content
  • Visual Art
    • artist books
      • Constellating
      • Gringo Death Coloring Book
      • Puerto Rico en mi corazón
    • broadsides & prints
    • (k)not work
    • w@nder
  • Writing
    • poetry
    • translations
    • essays
  • Editing & Design
    • editing
    • design
  • Teaching
  • About
    • contact
    • blog
  • Fiskars Printmakers

Category Archives: Reviews

Show Grid Show List

Post navigation

← Older posts
Newer posts →

FSG Book of 20th Century Latin American Poetry Reviewed

June 10, 2011 by E. Rowan

The work of an anthologist is violent, like that of a translator, dismembering a whole cultural context and transporting limbs of it to a new environment. And like translation, the result can always be termed as loss—a loss of wholeness (i. e. context), a loss of embodiment in time and place (i. e. culture). The pieces become relics, deadened in a museum of pages instead of alive in their usefulness. The act of collecting them, framing them and presenting them, […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: anthology, Ilan Stavens, Latin America, poetry, review, reviews, translation, twentieth century

Leave a comment

Why I won’t finish this book

April 22, 2011 by E. Rowan

A review of the first 11 pages of Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible by Peter Robinson (Liverpool University Press, 2010). $95 My time is valuable, and I always have too much to read. There is so much great literature out there, and a lot of really interesting scholarship, and it piles and piles and I’ll never get to it all. So I’ve lately become more discerning, and if I find a book of criticism overly dull without […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews, Translation

3

The sky goes missing

April 6, 2011 by E. Rowan

This year I was asked to be on the committee for the Best Translated Book Award given out by Open Letter Books for newly-translated works of poetry and fiction published within the last year. It was great, not only did I get to read tons of great translated poetry, I got to talk seriously about it with other amazing poets and translators. And the award will be announced just after the translation slam at PEN World Voices! In the meantime, […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews, Translation • Tags: Best Translated Book Award, Open Letter Books, PEN World Voices, review, Three Percent, Time of Sky & Castles in the Air, translation

Leave a comment

Objectively Dangerous: There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair by Tomaž Šalamun

March 1, 2011 by E. Rowan

Tomaž Šalamun’s latest book of poems to be translated into English,There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair, is as difficult as the title suggests. The book has to be read slowly, carefully, over and over for it to unfurl; the poetry is not immediately accessible and requires commitment, dedication. It is demanding, complex and strange. It can’t be absorbed in the span of a single read. Rather, this is the kind of book that I want to come back […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: Cerise Press, poetry, review, Tomaz Salamun, translation

Leave a comment

Voices from the Bitter Core

February 17, 2011 by E. Rowan

Voices from the Bitter Core by Ursula Krechel, trans. Amy Kepple Strawser (Host Publications, 2010). Ambitious in scope, and stunningly executed. The voices that blur together and pull apart are simultaneously sympathetic and horrific, the collage technique at once jarring and unifying. This is a work of paradoxes, of dissonance and contradiction, an utterly human work. In its examination of the voices of war it implicitly questions the rationale for killing, without falling into propaganda. The work collapses time, moving […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, political poetry, review, translation

Leave a comment

say song you say

February 13, 2011 by E. Rowan

My review of engulf — enkindle is up at Three Percent. I really liked this book. As Chad said: But today, Erica is gushing rather than screeding . . . Based on the first paragraph alone, I think Erica kinda sorta likes this collection . . . (And be sure to scroll to the bottom to hear a recording Erica did of one of the poems): engulf — enkindle is a stunning book of poetry. It literally stunned me into […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: Anja Utler, experimental poetry, Kurt Beals, poetry, review, Three Percent, translation

Leave a comment

Subversive Poetry

January 20, 2011 by E. Rowan

So I’m not slacking in my book-a-day goal, though yes, I’m slacking on posting here. The book I finished a few days ago was Martín Espada’s The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive. It was (as I expected it would be) extraordinary. Martín is, for anyone who doesn’t know, an incredibly prolific contemporary Puerto Rican poet who writes in English and teaches at UMass Amherst. He started his professional life as a lawyer, and in the first essay […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews • Tags: Martín Espada, poetry, political poetry, Puerto Rico, reviews

Leave a comment

Praises & Offenses

January 12, 2011 by E. Rowan

I finished reading this morning the anthology Praises & Offenses: Three Women Poets from the Dominican Republic. The poets are Aida Cartagena Portalatin, Angela Hernandez Nunez and Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo (those names are all missing their accents, because my little cheap portable pc sucks and won’t accept key-commands for accents). The translator is Judith Kerman, the publisher is Boa Editions, it came out in 2009. I started writing what I thought would be a brief summary of the book to put […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation • Tags: Aida Cartagena Portalatin, Angela Hernandez Nunez, BOA Editions, Dominican Republic, Judith Kerman, poetry, review, translation, Ylonka Nacidit-Perdomo

Leave a comment

Poetry is to flap without wings

December 13, 2010 by E. Rowan

My review of Birds for A Demolition by Manoel de Barros translated by Idra Novay is up on Three Percent. Here’s a piece of it—you can read the full thing here: Birds for a Demolition is a deceptively slight book of deceptively simple poems. Poems that at first glance seem embedded in the natural world, in the landscape of Brazil, in the language of the wetlands. But this is in fact an expansive collection, spanning more than forty years of […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation

Leave a comment

This world is a horror movie

December 9, 2010 by E. Rowan

My review of Cipango by Tomás Harris translated by Daniel Shapiro is up on the Quarterly Conversation. Here’s a bit of it, read the whole thing over there: In this mad, dark history there is nevertheless beauty. In moments of poetic grace, the lyrical skills of both Harris and translator Daniel Shapiro shine. The grimy urban rhythm of the poetry pulses beneath the skin of the poems, surfacing in moments of clarity and concision. The most successful moments in the […]

Categories: Reviews, Translation

Leave a comment

Post navigation

← Older posts
Newer posts →

patreon newsletter
instagram
shop

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com
  • Subscribe Subscribed
    • E. Rowan Mena
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • E. Rowan Mena
    • Subscribe Subscribed
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...