Black Box Named Like to Me

Diana Garza Islas

Translated by Cal Paule

POETRY, TRANSLATION  | $20

November 2024
Read an excerpt

from “Box of Honey (Example)”

 

A

aether. Like when a stone cloud falls.

arrow. No routine without the rind.

arachnida scorpiones. Animal that dreams in hexagons.

at. Means that the sun is sprouting from its shell.

amber. They say the symptomatic river envies the sun.

airplane. Example: I built a paper palace tomorrow.

blue. Everything unseen.

 

B

bone (mandible). You shouldn’t say it out loud or your mandible will fall off.

kiss (blown). You wash this drown while pulling your hair out to the ardor of your glassed crowns.

brilliance. Sun cadaver. Every time.

 

C

cuticle. At the bottom we’re all purple octopi.

course. Found river. I run.

cumulus. Stairs, staring at no one.

cells (honey, brood, pollen, queen). Can also take the following forms: a jar of blemish cream, a zipper, a man’s shoe, a woman’s, and a razor.

cardiac. Your mechanic means of oxidated sacs.

creak. Happens when different roots yell dead leaves.

corpus. I’m my own castle.

Black Box Named Like to Me challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in the translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will. Vocal momentum drives these poems onward and outward with a force that is just as funny as it is poignant. It is Garza Islas’s first book, and the first to be translated into English.

About the Author

Diana Garza Islas (Santiago, Nuevo León, México, 1985) is the author of Caja negra que se llame como a mí (Bonobos), Adiós y buenas tardes, Condesita Quitanieve (El Palacio de la Fatalidad), and Catálogo razonado de alambremaderitas para hembra con monóculo y posible calavera (Conarte). Excerpts from this yellow cycle of books can be found in the anthology En el fondo todo poema es yo de niña mirándola (La Cleta Cartonera). She published El sol es verde si lo miras (UANL) as part of a green cycle of books. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Primer infolio de las Vidas reunidas de Almería Smarck (UAEMEX) and La czarigüeya escribe (An.Alfa.Beta).

Praise

Black Box Named Like to Me feels at first like a fever dream. But over time, these poems—sharp, fleet-footed, almost synesthetically intense—urge us into a state of heightened lucidity. Again and again, Diana Garza Islas's exuberant, kinetic intelligence remind us that language acquisition—in children, yes, but also in writers and readers of poems—is always an inventive act. The work of this wonderfully strange and brilliant poet is both celebrated and transformed, as every good translator must do, by Cal Paule: their English translation darts and winks, scampers and slinks, watches itself thinking aloud, and continually makes itself anew.

Robin Myers

These are vivid, bright, imaginative poems that have an irresistibly ironic and yet delicate way of approaching the reader through both narration and imagery, prose poetry and versification. The translator has succeeded in bringing the love for language across, along with the subtle and ambiguous relationship of the speaker with poetry (the push and pull, the silence and the chaos, the brutality, and the tenderness).

Asymptote

In such a striated, complex nebulae of words, populated with verdure, colour, animal life, and geographical wonder, these poems are a veritable atlas, a world in which language is as alive as the creatures it represents.

Xiao Yue Shan

...I particularly admire how [Paule] handled the challenges encountered in Garza Islas’ poems, especially the idiosyncratic syntax, the portmanteaus and neologisms, the surprising linguistic juxtapositions. [Paule] navigates linguistic and cultural demands with a keen attention to how semantic disruptions in the original may be ‘mediated’ and recreated into English and for an audience that might feel, as I do, excitedly disoriented.

Mihaela Moscaliuc

About the Translator

Cal Paule is a translator, poet, and teacher from Saint Paul, MN. Their work has appeared in Waxwing, Reading in Translation, Asymptote, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where they are the comics editor at The Arkansas International. They teach gender studies.

In the News

Links

Excerpts from Black Box Named Like To Me in Waxwing Mag

Excerpts in Revista Plastico

Excerpts in Asymptote

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-24-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 232 pp, 5.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: November 01 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books