Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico

Even avid poetry readers will be hard pressed to name many Mexican poets aside from Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz or perhaps Jamie Sabines. This anthology, published as part of a cultural exchange between the U.S. and Mexico, attempts to redress that problem with translations of poems by 50 Mexican poets born after 1945. (A companion volume of 50 translated American poets will be published simultaneously in Mexico.) The selections emphasize ""the friction and diversity of current Mexican poetry,"" as the editor hopes: from Bargallo's own elliptical prose poems (""line in flames and the curtain of pink meat reverberates throughout the body without body..."") to the traditional sonnets of Javier Sicilia, translated rhymes and all by John Sweeney-Taylor, American readers will find a familiar range of poetic sensibilities, spanning the personal, political, experimental and magical. This anthology is likely to point the way toward new discoveries, such as Monica de la Torre's deft rendering of the plainspoken Eduardo Hurtado (""Should you paint / a credible sky / you must keep in mind / its essential phoniness""), Alfonso D'Aquino's untitled concrete poem in which words slant across the page like rain on a window, challenging the conventions of reading, or Ricardo Castillo's searing self-portrait, ""Autogol,"" which ends, in Jill Levine's version, ""What a Fucker."" In any case, this book offers American readers opportunities to find poets who are likely to become new favorites.