Tag: poetry

Los Surcos del Azar

March 9, 2017 by Erica Mena

One of my very favorite things about translating is how hard it is. As any five translators to work on the same sentence and you’ll get five different results, all of them perfectly legitimate and yet none the same. There are a ton of great translation theorists who talk about this (many of whom I’ve been teaching this semester in the phenomenal translation theory class I’m doing with the Low Residency MFA in Literary Translation at Mills College!), but that […]

Categories: Translation • Tags: antonio machado, erica mena, literary translation, poetry, poetry translation, translation

Experimental Poets of Color

September 19, 2016 by Erica Mena

Up until a few years ago I thought I had to choose between being a “Puerto Rican poet” and being an “experimental poet.” Puerto Rican poets write about things like their abuela, or El Morro, o la isla, o salsa, o Nuevayork, o cualquier cosa. It probably didn’t help that the only Puerto Rican poet writing in English I knew, knew of, or had ever heard of was Martín Espada, whose work is exceptional and beautiful and extremely lyrical and more or less […]

Categories: Poetry, Teaching • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, teaching

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Dark Things Have Their Origin In Myself

February 25, 2016 by Erica Mena

[or notes on reading about the gothic] A few months I decided it was high time I stopped denying my ultra-goth aesthetic leanings and instead turn fully into exploring them. This was mostly thanks to the phenomenal collection of essays Dark Museum by Maria Negroni, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero and published by Action Books. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I realized that there is perhaps a way of approaching the gothic as a latinx that would allow me to circumvent the […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: darkness, gothic, poetry

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The Making of the Covers

March 20, 2015 by Erica Mena

7 runs, 9 hours, 4 days, 3 different presses, 3 different covers. Maybe only another letterpress printer will understand the insanity that felt like, getting three of the four handmade letterpress covers for the Anomalous Press 2015 season done in the past week. (The fourth is being printed by the phenomenal Lee Marchalonis, and I don’t even know what it looks like yet, but she’s one of my favorite printers ever!). I started out last week with the cover for The All-New by […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: anatomy of a museum, Anomalous Press, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, fiction, ian hatcher, iceland, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, nonfiction, penis museum, phallological museum, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, the all-new, third person singular

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My Week In Books

March 13, 2015 by Erica Mena

Featherbone. from Featherbone: Searshut your throat & open soundless: again—it pierces your back— spins—you lurch and plummet— light is: to blame you: unother. The light is already bleaching your veins metasomatized —blooming in the cracks the fissures. This is my book, Featherbone. It’s a cyborg feminist retelling of Icarus, driven by compound neologisms. The cover art is by Wangechi Mutu, titled “Love’s a Witch, Orfeo’s Underworld Coronation for Euridice,” 2006. Mutu is a Kenyan-born artist and sculptor who resides in […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: Anomalous Press, arrowsmith press, askold melnyczuk, cole swenson, collier nogues, drown/sever/sing, drunken boat, erica mena, featherbone, frank andre jamme, ian hatcher, jorie graham, la presse, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, melissa green, poetry, the all-new, the ground i stand on is not my ground, to the secret

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What do Rosmarie Waldrop, a penis museum, columbian legends, and code poetry have in common?

March 4, 2015 by Erica Mena

The new season of Anomalous Press titles is nearly upon us, and I spent the whole day getting these amazing things off to the printer. (I’m so spacey that I just wrote titles, then it looked wrong so I tried titels, but no, its, definitely titles…) [update: you can now pre-order the whole 2015 season!] And seriously, I say this every year, but these books are so so good! As always, we’re doing super-limited runs of 100, with digital (but beautifully designed) […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: a kendra greene, all-new, anatomy of a museum, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, chapbook, columbian literature, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, experimental, experimental nonfiction, experimental poetry, ian hatcher, iceland, keith waldrop, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, lyric essay, phallological society, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, third person singular

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Small Press Publishing Goals: Making Future People's Heads Explode

February 27, 2015 by Erica Mena

“My mission is to create beautiful, strange little books that a grad student studying the small press movement of the early 21st century will find in a special collections somewhere and they will make her head explode. Can you give us a preview of what’s current and/or forthcoming from your catalog, as well as what you’re hoping to publish in the future? Well, last season we only put out three titles, and they were all poetry. Outer Pradesh by Nathaniel […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: Anomalous Press, experimental poetry, keith waldrop, nathaniel mackey, outer pradesh, poetry, publishing, rosmarie waldrop, small press

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Judging A Book By Its Cover (And Interior!)

February 11, 2015 by Erica Mena

Form fixed, or flowing? That’s the question I think about a lot in terms of new book forms. Is a particular text flowing, like water, able to shape itself without losing anything to many different containers (page sizes, margins, font faces, leading, etc.) depending on the preference of the reader. Or is a text, like many poems, fixed. The line has to end where it ends or the meaning and artistry of the text are compromised. There’s clearly room in […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: book design, design, poetry, poetry design, poetry publishing

Canyon in the Body by Lan Lan translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

February 9, 2015 by Erica Mena

In many ways this book is exactly what I expected. It is a collection of beautiful, light, lyric poems, in a very traditional translation that is beautiful, light, lyric and focused on image and meaning and very occasionally sound. If this appeals to you, you will love this book. For me, though, there wasn’t much beyond a few occasional moments that really grabbed me about it. Lan Lan is clearly a finely attenuated poet, one who puts great care into the […]

Categories: Poetry, Reviews • Tags: canyon in the body, chines poetry, contemporary poetry, fiona sze-lorrain, lan lan, literary translation, poetry, translation, zephyr press

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"All good poetry is experimental"

January 20, 2015 by Erica Mena

I recently had the humbling experience of doing poorly on an interview for something I really wanted. I actually interview terribly, so it’s not really surprising to me, but still disappointing nonetheless. One of the members of the committee interviewing me is a poet I’ve admired for a long time, who’s work I’ve studied and taught, and I’m sure that didn’t make things any easier, nerves-wise. One of the questions posed to me that I hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t even ever […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: citizen, claudia rankine, experimental poetry, poetry, susan howe

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