Negro marfil / Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona and translated by Jen Hofer

This is poetry from Mexico.

Negro marfil / Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona translated by Jen Hofer is published by Les Figues Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2011.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781934254226E12.

Myriam Moscona’s Negro marfil / Ivory Black, translated from Spanish by Jen Hofer, feels like a book built around doubleness: title against title, language against language, body against memory. The bilingual presentation matters because the work does not seem interested in passing quietly into English. It asks the reader to notice the pressure between surfaces, the blackness and ivory of image, inheritance, intimacy, and fracture. I would not approach it as a book that explains itself cleanly. Moscona’s poetry, at least from the shape suggested here, belongs to that register where lyric becomes an instrument for sensing what identity cannot state directly. Hofer’s translation gives the book a necessary edge, allowing the poem’s strangeness to remain awake rather than domesticated.

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.