I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty years ago by someone born in 1935. How can it be? Susana Thénon’s flair for code-switching—from Argentine regionalisms to mock etymologies to an ever-seductive English—seems ahead of its time, as do her poems’ fragmentariness, skepticism of language and its institutions. (Vide letters, bureaucracy.) Clearly, they weren’t, but that’s the magic of their immediacy and of Rebekah Smith’s brilliant translations. Caustic, restless, and delighting in their own performativity, they’ll make you want to catch up with them.
Mónica de la Torre
One of the best kept secrets of Argentine literature, Susana Thénon’s poetry takes on new life in this subtle English version of her Ova Completa. Wisely mixing critical reflection and casual impudence, literary references and unruly banter, Thénon draws her readers into a powerfully disquieting reading, a dialogue not only with her many voices but with literature itself.
Sylvia Molloy
This is the first time I’ve endorsed a book after reading a handful of poems because I’ve never encountered a handful of poems this intriguing. Is Susana Thénon Jorge Louis Borges' long lost daughter, is she Juan Gelman’s sister, or is she a star from some wholly underrecognized dimension? It took just a sampling of Ova Completa to expand both my sense of the Argentinian literary landscape and my sense of poetic innovation. I can’t wait to read the rest of this rich and resonating collection.
Terrance Hayes
Sardonic yet joyful, sarcastic and crazed, the poems in Ova Completa indulge in a transgressive delight in the way that all language—governmental or poetic, casual or authoritative—can be worked over, either made to crumble or to recompose.
Kathleen Rooney, Poetry Foundation
By the end of the collection, it becomes possible to envision the woman’s scream not as a breaking point, but as a radical move to demand space—like Thénon granting herself an Ova Completa—in a world that gives so much space to men. It is a call to pay attention to the asterisk fodder—to translate it.
Olivia Lott, Kenyon Review
In so many ways, Thénon was a poet ahead of her time. As so many of us are seeking a decolonizing, intersectional approach to justice issues, Thénon offers poems that draw attention to the sociopolitical assumptions we take for granted. Rather than allowing us to fall prey to what acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story,” Thénon offers a plurality of voices, a poliphony embedded in the mixing of linguistic registers, the variety of allusions, and at times actual dialogue within the poems. This writing is open-ended and, like Smith’s translation, like all translation, unfinished – which is ultimately so much better than the alternative. This is poetry that leaves us suspended and unsettled...
Jeannine Pitas, Reading in Translation
Experiments with language, with writing, with discursive genres, with situations and communicative actions or with pragmatic effects; [Thénon's later poems] are, in a parodic version, a reflection on all of these. They are also… a bleak and acidic gaze on a world that “enduring—until when?—it destroys itself” and that incessantly longs to see reconstruction rising up over destruction.
Ana María Barrenechea
The thematization is almost obsessive around the book as aesthetic object and as commodity that offers a double market to circulation: that of the buying and selling, and that of the critical and academic discourse. In the face of both, this text shows itself as a relentless mocker. And so an anti-aesthetic proposal arises… the effect is to topple hierarchies and distances, contaminate territories, violently erase the limits of a discourse typified as “cultured poetry.” … A heterogeneous and mutant text that on a few pages reasons with cartoonish humor, on others becomes linguistic decomposition à la Girondo, and on others almost a Cortázaran fantastic tale or almost a Borgesian essay, almost a popular song. The reader can perhaps find in these almosts a little appeasement: a powerful discursive will seeps through...
Delfina Muschietti
Thénon’s poems can be fully appreciated in Rebekah Smith’s translations, and they are truly a gift to lovers of poetry.
Marlene Gottlieb, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas
