From the Lightning by Gonzalo Rojas and translated by John Simon

This is poetry from Chile.

From the Lightning by Gonzalo Rojas translated by John Simon is published by Green Integer. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2008.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781933382647E12.

Gonzalo Rojas’s From the Lightning, translated by John Simon, carries the voltage one hopes for from its title. Rojas is one of Chile’s major poets of eros, time, death, and ecstatic perception, and his work often feels struck into being rather than calmly composed. Lightning is not just brightness. It is rupture, revelation, danger, and a form of attention too sudden to domesticate. Simon’s translation allows the poems to retain their charged lyric movement, where sensuality and metaphysical pressure often arrive together. I would recommend this book to readers who want a passionate, high-voltage Chilean poetry that does not separate the body from the cosmos. Rojas can be lush, urgent, and philosophical in the same breath. From the Lightning is a reminder that some poems do not illuminate a room slowly. They split the sky.

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.