Diary by Liliana Ponce and translated by Michael Martin Shea

This is poetry from Argentina.

Diary by Liliana Ponce translated by Michael Martin Shea is published by Ugly Duckling Presse. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781946433183E12.

Liliana Ponce’s Diary, translated by Michael Martin Shea, turns the idea of the diary away from confession and toward concentration. The book carries the intimacy of dated thought, but it does not simply document a life in the plain sense. Instead, it lets daily perception become a field of philosophical pressure, where ordinary attention keeps slipping into abstraction, memory, and bodily uncertainty. Ponce’s work belongs to a lineage of Argentine poetry deeply interested in consciousness as an event rather than a stable possession. Shea’s translation allows the poems to retain their sparseness and their inward tension. I like this kind of book because it refuses the melodrama of self-revelation. It trusts the small notation, the pause, the unfinished thought. Diary is a book for readers who believe that a private sentence can become a room, and that a room can become weather.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.