Contracorriente

by Tedi López Mills

The poems in Against the Current expose a mind moving fast as water. Tedi López Mills renders a river as a cool but contaminated space, propelling its detritus through a hybrid rural/urban zone that is inhabited by allegory and rife with collision. As the poems swim upstream, they accrue the impurities and complicities of memory, embodied in the central figure of the brother who is also the other. Wendy Burk reproduces the baroque, occasionally frenetic rhythms of the abecedarian original with lucidity, in these poems that underscore that Mexico is defined by physical and philosophical contrast.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Bere Tarará · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta poesía me cuesta mucho trabajo pero me fascina, a veces siento que he entendido y algo y ministros después me doy cuenta que lo entiendo nada. Tedi escribe metáforas precisas y preciosas

[Jesús Ramón Ibarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A partir del agua, Tedi va tejiendo asociaciones que vinculan una historia que late en lo profundo de una consciencia tan despierta como elusiva. Se trata de una poesía que apela a la sonoridad y se abre a los espacios de un lenguaje que va encontrando su cauce permanentemente.

[Andrés Plascencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

¡Qué buena es!

[Luis Arroyo]

Puedo con la Tedi ensayística, y aunque a ratos me cueste su embrolloso lenguaje intelectual, su forma de hilvanar oraciones e ideas, logro que me guste. Pero Tedi poeta me es absolutamente imposible, tedi-osa y aburrida. No puedo, no pude.

[World Literature Today]

"In a Drunken Boat interview by Rebecca Seiferle, Mexican poet and translator Tedi López Mills states, “I don’t know if it pertains to the more ‘personal’ streak in American poetry or rather to concretion, to direct experience. Our tradition, which comes to us in part by way of France, is more abstract: fixed metaphor, understanding through analogies.” It is true that Against the Current is metaphorical and analogical; it is also deeply informed by ecopoetics, philosophy, and critical theory. In this collection, abstractions and analogy are grounded in—arise from—strong concrete and natural imagery, with rivers serving as the guiding metaphor." - Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

This book was the featured review in the November/December 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

"moral / penumbra I restore by reading, you watched those torsos, ancient friend, / see how fear carves out its own beach, sloping sea, I forget what I feel / when schematic space lasts beyond the cliff, then I cajole / my sensitive self, sweetly penalized by irony, let it go, I insist, / be the world but be brief [...]"