Eleonora Requena’s poetry is fundamental for any reader interested in Latin American poetry.
Oriette D’Angelo
Outside Texts
Eleonora Requena
Translated by Guillermo Parra
December 2022
Textos por fuera / Outside Texts is a collection of poems that question themselves, the Spanish language, the poetic self, and the author’s personal geographies within and beyond Venezuela and Argentina. Animating the texts in this book is the experience of exile and migration in response to a collapsing nation and its dramatic, ongoing crisis. These poems seek spaces to exist outside (and within) the everyday self and beyond the poem as a fixed creation.
Included in the Señal 2022 Bundle.
About the Author
Eleonora Requena (Caracas, 1968) studied Letras at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and participated in the writing workshops of the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos in the 1990s. Her books of poetry include Sed (Eclepsidra); Mandados (La Liebre Libre), winner of the Premio de la V Bienal Latinoamericana de Poesía José Rafael Pocaterra; Es de día (El Pez Soluble); La Noche y sus agüeros (El Pez Soluble); Ética del aire (Bid & Co. Editor); and Textos por fuera (El Taller Blanco). Her work has been included in various anthologies in Venezuela and Latin America. Requena now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Praise
Eleonora Requena’s poetry is fundamental for any reader interested in Latin American poetry. Now, thanks to this magnificent translation by Guillermo Parra, it will also be available for English-speaking readers who might encounter her work. Outside Texts names silence with subtlety and translates the edge of verbs in constant unfolding. It conjugates the experience of the outside along with the most intimate aspects of the self, bringing us closer to the absolute being of the word, a being named from within to give the world meaning through tenderness. Requena writes poetry of the deepest honesty, an honesty made into words that make us live and resist.
Oriette D’Angelo
Praise for Previous Work
We all coincided, from different points of appreciation, on the high quality of language the author manifested, in the fragments from her prize-winning and still unpublished book [mandados] that appeared in these pages. Her poetry, we agreed, is the retelling of a journey, one she undertakes in obedience to a mandate. The order begins in an “underworld of complex branches,” according to her own words, whose severity allows no delay or distraction. She admits this with no reservations when she says: “I almost obeyed as I’m alive.” Eleonora agrees it’s a question of family, “they;” ghosts and beings, whose evolutions are understood within four walls. Days at home are ripped sheets of paper, that revolve around themselves, within a paralyzed atmosphere, continuously approaching us and distancing itself with no explanation. Language recounts, recounts by trade, with the need to seek and leave a record of what has been found, whether by chance or persistence.
Salvador Garmendia
About the Translator
Guillermo Parra (Cambridge, MA, 1970) is a poet and translator. He has published translations of the poets Juan Sánchez Peláez (Black Square Editions) and José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Noemi Press), as well as the novel The Conspiracy (Phoneme Media) by Israel Centeno. His bilingual edition of selected poems by Vicente Gerbasi is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. His poems have appeared in the magazines The Canary and Castle Grayskull. He lives in Clearwater, FL.
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946604-13-2
Chapbook
40 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 01 2022
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Señal #20