Dear Parent or Guardian

Dear Parent or Guardian

December 2023
Author
Translator
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Dear Parent or Guardian

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SKU: 978-1-946604-06-4 Category:
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About the Book

In dear parent or guardian, Isadoro Saturno writes from the perspective of a child who discovers the insufficiency of gendered language. Over the course of this bilingual chapbook, gendered pronouns are found harbored inside an expanse of phonetically and homophonically spelled words, a maneuver that translator E.R. Pulgar employs to carry through the humor and interrogation of gender in the original text. With a youthful spirit of play, these verses carve out a space in language for queerness and call for this space to be populated with myriad variations on, departures from, and complications of he/she/they. 

Author

Isadoro Saturno

Isadoro Saturno (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1987) is a poet, editor, and children’s book writer living in Atlanta. In 2018, he published his first children’s book Conejo y Conejo with Ediciones Ekaré, which won the Banco del Libro prize for Best Children and Young Adult book and in 2020 was translated into Chinese. His poems have appeared in various anthologies including PROVEA’s Poesía contra la opresión (1920–2018) and were awarded third place in the II Rafael Cadenas Young Poets Prize.

Translator

E.R. Pulgar

E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, journalist, and translator. They are the author of Sonnet to the Serpent and Other Poems (Wonder Press). Their criticism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Playboy, and elsewhere. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, Changes Review, Epiphany, blush lit, and the Poetry Project newsletter. A finalist for the seventh Rafael Cadenas Young Poets Prize, they curate the Endless Blue salon at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Praise

Isadoro Saturno’s writing deploys his singular identity in brief forms and constrictions where he atomizes the voice into a stinging and precise register. In dear parent or guardian this peculiarity is expressed in organic, germinal, and dysphoric language communicated through the lens of childhood. Isadoro, a children’s book author, poet, and translate, writes himself into the panorama of Latin American literature with this gem that succeeds in moving us anew with the possibility of the transmutation of poetic language.
— Eleonora Requena
dear parent or guardian is a message in a bottle, one where Isadoro “from the past” shows us that other childhoods are possible: ones that resist the mandate of gender and find ways that save the child’s agency, creating a world that is more authentic, free, joyful. In this way, those children that reclaim their voices in adulthood can shed light on a society where the darkness of rigid norms, psycho-emotional violence, and adult-centric thinking diminish happiness and the echo of who we are, forcing us into “who we have to be.” Dear reader, childhood is to be accompanied, not judged. Dear reader, trans childhood exists. Dear, dear reader.
— Frida Cartas
What can our child selves teach us about gender’s arbitrary rules? How did our smaller selves live fully in the face of institutions and family dynamics? In E.R. Pulgar’s translation of Isadoro Saturno’s estimado representante, they mirror a juicy fragmented poetics of play that glitches open a door between first and second puberties. Here, language is a game of expansion and transformation, of refusal and imagination. Pulgar splits open English until it merry-go-rounds into a vast playground of sound. As someone who’s been skeptical of a principal’s authority since kindergarten, I am deeply grateful to be this world’s playmate.
— Alexis Aceves García

Praise for Previous Work

They summon the greatest forces of poetry to make a music that captivates, ascends, and begins language anew.
— Dorothea Lasky
Pulgar here has generously carved a place for us queers to set up camp.
— Óscar Moisés Díaz
…blew me away in all the best possible ways.
— Moira Egan

In the News

dear parent of guardian reviewed in Latin American Literature Today
Isadoro Saturno’s dear parent or guardian reviewed in Rialta

Excerpt

she says this is Patricio hi nice to meet ya

look check out my cool handshake

palm squeeze fist bump toe to toe

psss at the end and he’s got it

 

he gives her a rose

perfumed their eyes lock

i too want

elegance a suit a princess

 

shaving cream raze/her mir/her

i look to my left then my right

imitate mi papi

towel around his waist relaxed

 

what are you doing they yell outside

i hide i hide

i make like i’m swimming

in the sink wat/her

Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-06-4
, 40pp, W:5.25in x H:8.25in
Publication Date: December 1, 2023
Distribution: ,