Description

Úrsula Starke

Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas

ISBN: 978-1-956921-74-8 (pbk.)

(August, 2026) 

Wisteria collects the work of four books Úrsula Starke published between 2000 and 2020 as well as some uncollected poems that appeared in journals in the same time frame. Her style might be called neobaroque, drawing on imagery from Catholicism and engaging intertextually with a wide range of writers and artists, but always enacting a subversion of traditional Catholic imagery into a discourse of resistance to patriarchal social norms, while drawing on a variety of themes: struggles with mental illness, the premature deaths of loved ones to cancer and other illnesses, and the historical trauma of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Surreal and shocking, astonishing and disturbing, Úrsula Starke’s “Auschwitz at dawn” is “lit by a hundred naked men.” Delicately translated, transporting both sense and sound, the poems stir in English while keeping some ghost music from the original. “I was born on an autumn morning/ with the garden’s/ posthumous roses;/ the cold darkness of a tomb/ The dead in the nearby cemetery are grateful/ to lie beneath the earth.” 

The book offers scenes of enormous literary force: interior landscapes converted into architecture, reflections about madness and the body, and a constant questioning of identity. The writing is crude, baroque, visceral; its poetics does not wish to seduce but to cut.

Indran Amirthanayagam, poet, translator, editor, publisher.

Starke’s lineated verse and prose poetry challenge the translator; the Spanish flies and dives like a cormorant, ethereal one moment, submerged in sensuality the next. Pitas and Kercheval soar and plummet right along with Starke, creating a work that transmutes into English all the untamed richness of Starke’s original. The result is a book that realizes Jacques Derrida’s criterion of good translation: not a mere decoding, but work that guarantees the survival of original, its “prolonged life, continuous life, and living on.” With skill and ear, with heart and voice, Pitas and Kercheval make Starke’s poetry come alive in English. Wisteria is a translation to savor and to hold.

Dana Delibovi, translator of Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila

Úrsula Starke’s poetry is thrillingly spiritual and erotic. Through the language of the body, it conveys a woman’s agony at once modern and baroque; it gives space for mental illness to serve as revelation. Translator dream team Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas gorgeously render the vividness of Starke’s work, its language thick as flesh. The rhythm of their English versions feels alive. “[Y]ou live on the edges of your notebook, shadow to shadow in shadow,” Starke writes in Kercheval and Pitas’s translation. We are lucky to inhabit this writing on the edge with a translation that protects the poetry’s secrets under its light.

Janet Hendrickson, translator of the Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Corvarrubias