Tokonoma by José Kozer and translated by Peter Boyle

This is poetry from Cuba.

Tokonoma by José Kozer translated by Peter Boyle is published by Shearsman Books. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2014.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781848613744E12.

José Kozer’s Tokonoma, translated by Peter Boyle, gives the Cuban section a book of formal intensity and cultural crossing. A tokonoma is a Japanese alcove used for display and contemplation, and that borrowed term already suggests Kozer’s interest in arrangement, attention, and the sacred or aesthetic charge of a small space. Kozer’s poetry is famously abundant, restless, and diasporic, often moving through Jewish, Cuban, and global inheritances in dense lyric motion. Boyle’s translation gives English readers access to that layered intelligence. Published by Shearsman Books, the collection belongs in the library as a work of excess and precision at once. It asks the reader to treat the poem as a room full of objects, ghosts, and sudden light.

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.