Spit Temple by Cecilia Vicuna and translated by Rosa Alcala

This is poetry from Chile.

Spit Temple by Cecilia Vicuna translated by Rosa Alcala is published by Ugly Duckling Presse. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2012.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781937027032E12.

Cecilia Vicuña’s Spit Temple, translated and edited with Rosa Alcalá, is a vital record of oral performance, embodied poetics, and the fragile architectures of voice. The title is wonderfully physical: spit as speech, body, moisture, offering, and temple as sacred structure. Vicuña’s work often exists between poem, performance, textile, ritual, political memory, and ecological attention, so the book matters because it does not pretend poetry lives only on the page. Alcalá’s role is essential in carrying the performance and bilingual complexity into a form English-language readers can enter. I like how Spit Temple insists that the poem is made of body before it is made of literature. Breath, saliva, sound, gesture, and memory all become part of the work. This is a book for readers interested in poetry as event, ceremony, and living trace.

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.