Last Return to Eden and Other Poems

Description

Sonia Manzano

Translated by Alexis Levitin

Last Return to Eden and Other Poems

ISBN:  978-1-956921-65-6 (pbk.)
(January, 2026) 

In this collection of daring poems, famed Ecuadorian writer Sonia Manzano, in her first full-length English translation, weaves together materials from Genesis, The Odyssey, and modern cinema, though her major inspiration clearly springs from two admired predecessors: Walt Whitman and Sappho. Whitman, the American bard of freedom, often appears as her Vergil, her guide, while Sappho, who passionately merged Eros and Thanatos, is her constant inspiration.

It is truly a revelation to have these powerful, often surrealistic, and wonderfully allusive poems by Sonia Manzano in a superb English translation by Alexis Levitin. Manzano’s poems are filled with imagery that sears to the soul—it’s a book that remains, reading after reading, hot to the touch.

— Ed Folsom, long-time editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Sonia Manzano is a poet, and her suffering is a lyric. Alexis Levitin’s translation gets this right; it’s clean and clear, like her starkly concrete images, the meat of her “fossilized violin of desire.” Like the original, this translation unveils a slow triumph of will—the lyric “goes on playing.” Our luck that English is the instrument!

—Peter Thompson, translator of Fernando Arrabal’s Letter To General Franco

Alexis Levitin’s translation of Sonia Manzano’s eight-part poetic suite “Ah Time” is heart-rending and enlightening—the poet’s appeal to current and future generations, meditating on the poet’s life, past and present racial and social injustices, police brutality, and misogyny. The sequence closes with the poet’s moving recognition of her fleeting time, the enduring nature of senseless suffering, and the fight that must go on, while she repeats this generation’s most poignant cry for help and call to action: George Floyd’s “I can’t breathe.”

—Adam Vines, Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review