An important influence on Jorge Luis Borges and many others, Oliverio Girondo was at the center of Argentine poetry in the twentieth century. A very cosmopolitan writer, his early poems-many of which are collected here for the first time in English-demonstrate his wanderlust, crisscrossing Europe and the Americas on streetcars, express trains, and ocean liners. Many of the poems in here were written in diverse world ports, and are perched at the seaside, among sailors, seagulls, and tango cafés. They take the reader on a tour of Spain that cleverly deflates the romantic glamour of the country found in Hemingway and Dos Passos, but reinvigorates it with a sexiness found in Girondo's intensive wordplay, Surrealistic influences, and idiosyncratic flare for metaphor.
"In the fabled history of experimental South American literature, Girondo's En la masmédula stands alongside Trilce as a marker of the fruitful extremes to which that modernism-anywhere & everywhere-can take us."
Jerome Rothenberg
"Girondo's poetry is a song to the transgressive imagination, an assault on routine. . . Unlike other experimental artists, his gestures usually transcended mere provocation. His work not only paved the way for a rigorous vanguardia, with a profound theoretical basis, but it also took up the quotidian as a field of action, enriching it with an absurd humor that ties it to a Hispanic tradition that
Andrés Neuman
"Girondo's effectiveness undeniably frightens me. I came to his work from the suburbs of my own verse, from that long line of mine where there are sunsets and little lanes and a blurry girl who looks clear next to a sky-blue balustrade. I saw him as so skillful, so apt at hopping off a streetcar in full stride, being reborn safe and sound amid the menace of car horns and stepping away from the pas
