Soft Matter by Lila Zemborain and translated by Christopher Winks

This is poetry from Argentina.

Soft Matter by Lila Zemborain translated by Christopher Winks is published by Quantum Prose. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2023.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780997301472E12.

Lila Zemborain’s Soft Matter, translated by Christopher Winks, draws its charge from the border between body and concept. The title borrows the language of material science, but in a poetic context it becomes something more sensuous and unstable: flesh, fluid, texture, vulnerability, and the forms that refuse to stay rigid. Zemborain’s poetry often thinks through the body at a large scale, moving between erotic materiality, philosophical inquiry, and cosmic pressure. Winks’s translation keeps that density present without making the poems feel overdetermined. I would recommend this to readers interested in experimental lyric that treats matter as alive with thought. Soft Matter is not soft in the sense of weak. It is soft in the sense of responsive, mutable, and difficult to contain. The poems ask what language becomes when it behaves less like stone and more like tissue.

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.