Poemas Cesantes by Raúl Hernández and translated by John Burns

This is poetry from Chile.

Poemas Cesantes by Raúl Hernández translated by John Burns is published by Cardboard House Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.78194572013E12.

Raúl Hernández’s Poemas Cesantes, translated by John Burns, is a Chilean book whose title carries the pressure of stoppage, unemployment, suspension, or being made inactive. Even before the first poem, the phrase suggests a lyric relation to precarity: poems that have ceased, people who have been dismissed, language caught in a social and economic pause. Burns’s translation gives English-language readers a way into that field without smoothing away the tension. I would read this book as part of a contemporary Chilean attention to work, crisis, public life, and the strange emotional conditions produced by systems larger than the individual. The poems likely matter not because they turn hardship into slogan, but because they let suspension become form. Poemas Cesantes is for readers interested in how a poem can speak from the stalled place, the waiting room, the social wound that does not announce itself politely.

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.