Poems to read on a streetcar by Oliverio Girondo and translated by Heather Cleary

This is poetry from Argentina.

Poems to read on a streetcar by Oliverio Girondo translated by Heather Cleary is published by New Directions. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780811221771E12.

Oliverio Girondo’s Poems to Read on a Streetcar, translated by Heather Cleary, is one of the great titles of urban modernist poetry because it knows exactly where its poems belong: in motion, among strangers, rattling through the city. Girondo’s early work is full of travel, speed, visual exaggeration, comedy, erotic perception, and the slightly feverish pleasure of modern life arriving all at once. Cleary’s translation keeps the poems bright, agile, and odd. The book is historically valuable as Argentine avant-garde writing, but it is also simply fun in the way good experimental poetry can be fun when it refuses to become homework. These poems look at the world as if the street itself had become a visual machine. They are for readers who want modernism with windows open, brakes squealing, and language delighted by its own instability.

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.