WHITE PINE PRESS
an independent literary publisher
Hatchet / Hamartia - Carmen Boullosa - translated by Lawrence Schimel - Cliff Becker Prize
$17.00 - ISBN 978-1-945680-39-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957988
“Lawrence Schimel is the perfect, deft translator for Carmen Boullosa’s marvelous, paradoxical, gnomic fables. The secret protagonist of these poems is nonlinear time in which old age leads to childhood, a bag of popcorn in the microwave takes exactly a lifetime to cook, a dead star’s light stirs the heart, and death shows up decked out in crinoline. Playful and pungent, Boullosa’s poems exemplify that affecting lightness Italo Calvino so admired. Just as you will.”
—Forest Gander
“Delicate yet vast, like a songbird flying between canyon and volcano, the poems of Carmen Boullosa are enchanting epigrams that seem to arise from a vanished language, so whispered yet adamant are their proclamations. I thrill to their emotional honesty and their musical decisiveness. Her statements curl around the edges of the rhetorical shapes they inhabit, and seem to be embroideries encircling the very statement that they are in the midst of making, like the roundabout yet tender address of a Cavafy or an Agnès Varda—a lament that is also a proud credo, an ode to slow gleaning. Thanks to Lawrence Schimel for translating Boullosa’s poems with such liquidity and concision.”
—Wayne Koestenbaum
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Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books in many different genres–including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and comics–and for both children and adults.
He has published two poetry chapbooks written in English: Fairy Tales for Writers and Deleted Names (both from A Midsummer Night's Press) and one written in Spanish, Desayuno en la cama (Egales). He has also edited various anthologies of poetry, including Ells s'estimen. Poemes d'amor entre homes (Llibres de l'Index), Best Gay Poetry 2008 (A Midsummer Night's Press), and De Chueca al cielo. 100 poemas celebrando la diversidad LGTBI (Transexualia).
Carmen Boullosa is the author of a dozen volumes of poetry, the most recent ones, Hamartia (Hiperión, Madrid), La patria insomne (Hiperión, Madrid) and La impropia (Taller Martín Pescador, Michoacán, México). One of her poems (“Angel Sound - Mexico City") was published in the American Poetry Review in 2013. She has also published eighteen novels (the most recent, El libro de Ana, about to appear at Coffee House Press, the preceding one was Texas: The Great Theft, shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize), as well as two books of essays, and ten plays (seven staged). Her work has been published by leading houses in Latin America and Spain and translated into ten languages.