Description

Luis Bravo

Translated by Catherine Jagoe & Jesse Lee Kercheval

ISBN: 978-1-944884-75-8 (pbk.)

(March, 2020) 

This completely bi-lingual edition makes available in both Spanish and English a wide selection of poems by the essential Uruguayan poet Luis Bravo. The author of twelve books of poetry and multimedia poetry performances, Bravo is a kingpin of Uruguay’s “Generation of ’80,” known for its iconoclastic search to reinvent what it saw as hidebound and defunct cultural models. Bravo’s work and cultural experiments are influenced by jazz and rock, the Beats, psychedelia and surrealism. These poems, beautifully translated by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval, buzz with sound and and explode with image, but are, at the same time. deeply human, exploring time, memory, dreams, death, and desire in ways that will forever change the way you see the world.

Luis Bravo is a magician, a sorcerer, and his poetry is magnetic and scalding. In these very fine translations by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Bravo’s radical, witty, anarchist spirit takes us on an otherworldly ride from which we emerge gifted, startled. 
—Mark Statman, author of Exile Home

Voice & Shadow is an exciting translation of a selection of Uruguayan poet Luis Bravo’s work from 1984 to the present. Its readers will get to know an eminent poet who works across the boundaries of art forms in inventive ways, combining performance with poetry to bring the sonorous elements of the genre to the forefront. Bravo’s work dialogues with that of other writers and artists in his own country and throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Jagoe and Kercheval’s noteworthy translations now bring his essential work to a larger audience of readers allowing them to experience the vibrancy of the language and images in his multidimensional compositions that celebrate a new avant-garde of the Americas.
—Jill S. Kuhnheim, author of Beyond the Page: Poetry and Performance in Spanish America

“I was trying to write the book of infinity/ on its autumnal pages, green,” Luis Bravo observes in Voice & Shadow, his new and selected poems brilliantly translated into English by Catherine Jagoe and Jesse Lee Kercheval. And the specter of eternity haunts his work, which captures the fragmentary nature of the human condition in a range of idioms, images, and ideas. Think of him as “the dreamer with a black umbrella,” who walks through the world in all its glory and grief, registering and naming what he sees and hears, tastes and touches, transforming all into a symphony of desire. Hear him!
—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood