Theory of the Voice and Dream by Liliana Ponce

Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self. For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when to write today is an emptiness, or when mouth and voice cannot find each other. Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.

A bolt of world-opening lightning. —CECILIA VICUÑA

This essential selection of poems by Liliana Ponce is a spiral to step into-a dazzling space of oblique light, distorted distances, wobbly time. Ponce fearlessly stares into the void, where the fragility of existence and the inevitability of transformation are to be mourned and embraced. Shea’s deft, receptive translations join Ponce in rejecting the trap of certainties, of fixities. This is a poetics of the beginning—not as an origin, but as an endless thrust of becoming and undoing. —MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO

Liliana Ponce reaches for the most elemental things, the ones you can see only under blurry light. Her serial poems are vehicles for traveling toward a more enigmatic dimension of reality. Translator Michael Martin Shea exercises great precision, holding himself to her poetic demand for total honesty. Together Ponce and Shea offer a “thinking blue,” turning each poem from day to its nightly unfolding. —KRISTIN DYKSTRA

Writing from “the ghostly passage,” the negative core, Liliana Ponce weaves language into states of sublime condensation, where time churns and dissolves and language remains on the brink of collapse and rebirth. In this luminous translation from Michael Martin Shea, I feel pulled into the endless shaping of sensation, and I look forward to returning again and again. —ALEXIS ALMEIDA

Ponce’s work is, without exaggeration, one of the most personal that has developed in our language in decades. —REYNALDO JIMENEZ

All thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime. —JOYELLE McSWEENEY

Latin American Literature. Argentine Literature. Poetry. Women’s Writing. Translation.