The Dirty Text by Soleida Rios and translated by Barbara Jamison

This is poetry from Cuba.

The Dirty Text by Soleida Rios translated by Barbara Jamison is published by Kenning Editions. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780999719817E12.

Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text, translated from Spanish by Barbara Jamison, is a Cuban poetry entry that sounds immediately suspicious of purity. The title suggests language as residue, contamination, body, politics, and experiment. A dirty text might be one that refuses polish, refuses obedience, refuses the fantasy that literature should arrive clean. That gives the reader a useful way in. Ríos’s poems should be approached as a site of friction, where language touches the material world and comes away marked. Published by Kenning Editions, the book is valuable for the library because it brings Cuban poetry into a more formally restless, contemporary space. It is not asking to be admired from a distance. It is asking to be handled.

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.