Cowboy & Other Poems

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco

Translated by Rachel Galvin

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $10

December 2019
Read an excerpt

from “Cowboy”

There are horses in the pubis, there are horses in the abdomen, in the pelvis there are algebraic bagpipes, there are some dumping gears, there are galápagos in the abdomen. There are galápagos and wallops: gallops.

*

(They say that’s a metaphor.) They say you eat it like this, like this, they say, they say bag, gallbladder, raft, they say membrane, bile, they say I’m rafting on a sea of bile, they say you have to cross with two coins on your eyes, I’d rather tear them out and just carry the sockets, the missing.

A brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.

Luis Felipe Fabre

Inventive, visceral, intricately musical, Cowboy & Other Poems showcases Alejandro Albarrán Polanco’s poetic and political vision, his lyrical and sonic intensity, and his fusion of political and personal inquiry. This selection draws from three recent collections, including Some People Are Not Horses (Algunas personas no son caballos), which was awarded the prestigious Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña in 2018. In Rachel Galvin’s translation, the sound play and intensity of Albarrán’s vision of contemporary life and its disparate forms of violence come to life.

About the Author

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco was born in Mexico City. His 2018 poetry collection Algunas personas no son caballos won the Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña. His other books include Ruido (Bonobos Editores), Tengo un pulmón que no es el cielo (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, La Ciebita), and Persona fea y ridícula (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro). He has received grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas, and Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura. He is a founding editor of the press Canón Accidental and co-director of the radio program Radio Rara. He is also a musician and conceptual artist whose performances, installations, and artist’s books have been featured in numerous art exhibitions. His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Polish, and Swedish, and will be featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2020. La Tempestad magazine named him the Emerging Writer of 2017.

Praise

A raucous outburst that opposes a poetry of silence—an aseptic, apolitical, ‘pure’ poetry—with the noise of the world, the sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.

Luis Felipe Fabre

Astride a language that begs us to be ridden, the poet knows all too well that the trick rests on being thrown off the beast. Albarrán succeeds, but not without cost: metaphors end up being head-aches, the unsayable is somatized, things are not even what they are not. Great book.

Mario Montalbetti

Albarrán’s writing first caught my attention because of a poem of his I read about a horse. I had written a poem about a horse that had become popular, the last poem from my 1985 book Nervadura. Horse with horse, they get along, I thought. Then I realized we had other logics in common. One of them, what my Brazilian concrete poet friends—Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos—disseminated not only in Brazil but in the whole world as a productive strategy for texts was what they called palavra-puxa-palabra. A strategy also present in Philippe Sollers’s Paradis and in Paulo Leminski’s masterpiece Catatau, and that we now find in Albarrán’s brilliant collection. The significance of this experience of Albarrán’s lies not only in its confirmation of his well-established talent, but in its recovery of a memory that’s not so old—concrete poetry and its derivatives begin in the 1950s—that is active and in bloom. [It is] Something that advocates of appropriation and their sidekicks insist on forgetting, seeking refuge in a viral capitalism that has made us complicit, among other things, in failing to remember what’s best in the human race: recognition.

Eduardo Milán

Prosthesis poems raising questions about the means by which the discourse of terror erodes our conversations. Piles of poems bursting into piles of words, crashing against the univocal: Albarrán’s work is an ensemble of voices resonating from the most sincere tenderness to the most terrible and terrifying ways in which the contemporary world of crime and horror is narrated. In this book a cowboy gallops on a thousand prairies of senseless sense, carrying us mounted on the rump, expectant.

Maricela Guerrero

About the Translator

Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books of poetry include Elevated Threat Level (Green Lantern Press), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Alice James Books Kinereth Gensler Award, and Pulleys & Locomotion (Black Lawrence Press). Her poems appear in journals like The Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet Press), which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation, and co-translator of Decals: Complete Early Poetry of Oliverio Girondo with Harris Feinsod (Open Letter Press). Her translation of Alejandro Albarrán Polanco’s poems will appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020. She is the author of a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945 (Oxford University Press), and is assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Galvin is a co-founder of Outranspo, an international creative translation collective.

In the News

Links

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco in FOLDER

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-37-4
Chapbook
Staple-bound. 40 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Señal #12