Sardine

Sardine

May 2026

Sardine

$20.00

In stock

SKU: 978-1-946604-44-6 Category:
"Sardine summons the erotic power of tautology, the slackness in every taut line, its abecedarian experiments and eccentric footnotes always returning to the animal urgency of song."
— Urayoán Noel

About the Book

Writing for the first time in Galician, Miriam Reyes crosses the oblique, multi-dimensional passages between Galicia and Venezuela, where she migrated at the age of eight. In Sardine, Reyes’ frustrations using her maternal grandfather’s native tongue become confrontations with the insufficiency of language itself, as a means to contain experience, meaning, and the self. Sardine lives in the ruptures in space and time forced open by migration and offers memory as a yoke for our discordant selves.

Author

Miriam Reyes

studied Literature at the Central University of Venezuela and graduated in Hispanic Philology at the University of Barcelona. She is the author of several poetry collections including Espejo negro (DVD), Bella durmiente, finalist for the 19th Hiperión Poetry Prize (Hiperión), Desalojos (Hiperión), Haz lo que te digo (Bartleby), Prensado en frío (Malasangre), Sardiña (Chan da pólvora) and Con (La bella Varsovia), for which she received the 2025 National Poetry Prize of Spain. In addition to being a poet, Reyes is an editor and translator into Spanish. She is the editor and translator of the anthology of contemporary Galician poetry Punto de ebullición (FCE). She translated from the Catalan El guante de plástico rosa by Dolors Miquel (Marisma), and has also translated Daniel Salgado’s Huelga general from the Galician (Marisma). Since the year 2000 Reyes has been combining poetry with other arts and technologies.

Translator

Laura Cesarco Eglin

is a poet and translator from Uruguay. Cesarco Eglin translates from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician. She is the translator of claus and the scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co•im•press), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. Cesarco Eglin is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry. She co-translated from the Portuñol Fabián Severo’s Night in the North (Eulalia Books). She is also the translator of The Mistaken Place of Things by Gabriela Aguirre (Eulalia Books, 2024). Cesarco Eglin is the author of three collections of poetry and four chapbooks, including Between Gone and Leaving–Home (dancing girl press, 2023), Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254, 2022), and Reborn in Ink, translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval (The Word Works, 2020).Cesarco Eglin is the co-founding editor and publisher of Veliz Books.

Praise

"In Sardine, Miriam Reyes has written a beautiful poem from a space beyond 'the fiction / the frustration / of the bilingual dictionary,' finding poetry in the complex and noisy space where languages—and poets—meet. The poem is shaped both by the 'difficulty' and the 'pleasure' of this noisy meeting place. This is a poem that hedges, hypothesizes, crosses out, footnotes, and relentlessly reworks its own language and logic. The difficulty is the pleasure in other words. Big thanks to Laura Cesarco Eglin for translating a superb, original, contemporary work of poetry with such cunning and skill.”
— Johannes Göransson
"Miriam Reyes is a poet of the oceanic body and its afterlives, of gills and guts, of the possibilities of a migrant form keyed to the breath of longing and the pulse of memory. Sardine summons the erotic power of tautology, the slackness in every taut line, its abecedarian experiments and eccentric footnotes always returning to the animal urgency of song. Laura Cesarco Eglin’s bold yet judicious translation vividly captures Reyes’ sense of wonder, her propulsive wordplay and alliteration, and the restlessness of a poetic intellect that refuses to 'call things by their name.' Here, the 'tonguedarkforest' is sovereign as it makes its own meanings and unsettles the biopower of translation, revealing 'the fiction / the frustration / of the bilingual dictionary.'”
— Urayoán Noel
"Miriam Reyes returns to the Galician language as lil sardine, fish out of water tossed onto the grill. Can a tongue left behind in emigration ever come alive in the mouth again? Reyes’s dexterity and slips upon entering Galician dip us all into the hazards of speech and the joy of reading. Any lover of language will delight in the tongue-tied tongue-wagging of these droll and captivating poems, brought marvellously into English by Laura Cesarco Eglin."
— Erín Moure

Excerpt

from PRATEADA GORXA / VENTRE
SILVER THROAT / WOMB

 

e digo eu / digo / eu
o que non fun quen de facer coa lingua da miña nai fareino coa túa
aínda que fale con dificultade
a dificultade é parte desta historia

o coitelo da lingua sen afiar estragando a carne toda

os beizos a abrirse e pecharse no mesmo son inútiles á hora de significar

mais óllame / olla para min
tan descalciña pola area coma a túa rianxeira


and i say / i say / i
what i wasn’t able to do with my mother’s tongue i’ll do with yours
even if i speak with difficulty
the difficulty is part of this story

the unsharpened knife of the tongue ruins the flesh entirely

the lips opening and closing for the same sound useless when it comes to meaning

but look at me / look my way
as “barefoot in the sand” as your “rianxeira”

Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-44-6
, 144pp, W:4.75in x H:7in
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Distribution: ,