WWPH Poetry in translation

"Aguas/Waters... places Avero's original poems next to Colson's translations, which are stunning in their ability to bring the melody and magical realism of Avero's Uruguayan Spanish into coherent English-language poems..." - Ella Feldman feature interview with Miguel Avero and Jona Colson in The Washington City Paper "Aguas/Waters is obsessed with dichotomies; the relationship between earth and space, the thin film between strangers and people we think we know, the struggle between naked truth and blissful ignorance, the heartache between presence and absence..." Pepper Cunningham, Mayday review Miguel Avero, author of Aguas/Waters, is a prolific contemporary writer in Uruguay. Uruguay is the smallest Spanish-speaking country in South America and is often overlooked for its literary significance. Uruguayan poetry is difficult to find in translation, and his work carries themes that include his love for his motherland, civil war, and political corruption. Avero's poems elevate impressions of the everyday into something that we can only know through language and image. With dream-like, disquieting language, Miguel Avero's poems leave us feeling untethered in a universe where "today every mist rubs us with its lips / and tomorrow the hurtful / fangs of the sun / will tear apart the uselessness of umbrellas." Jona Colson brings the original's stark imagery, rhythms, and subtle humor into a provocative English, as we seamlessly transition between past and present, between exterior and interior landscapes where we come to get a glimpse of the self, imperfect beings that we are. --Nancy Naomi Carlson, Winner, 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize A poet takes great time to write his life in some usable form, to illuminate the diurnal in ways that speak to the eternal, or at the very least provide an evidentiary record of having lived. Avero's delicacy could easily break in a clumsy hand, but Colson's translations uncover, with deep and abiding respect, this stratum of a soul at work, the traceries of Avero's dioramas to time and place and memory.n-Dan Vera, author of Speaking Wiri Wiri