Sexopurosexoveloz and Septiembre

by Dolores Dorantes

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer. sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre is a bilingual edition of books two and three of the author's lifelong project entitled Dolores Dorantes. Dorantes was born in Cordoba, Veracruz in 1973, and has lived in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua for the past twenty years. She has published four book-length works of poetry in Mexico, and is a founding member of the border arts collective Compaa Frugal (The Frugal Company), which counts among its activities publication of the monthly poetry broadside series Hoja Frugal, printed in editions of4,000 and distributed free throughout Mexico.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This handsome labor of love brought me up against the limits of poetry in translation, where cultural context weighs as much as swapped lexicons. It enjoys the expert translation skills of Jen Hofer; a hot period design from Quemadura; and a strong, well-placed desire to bring over the flavor of an important dissident Mexican voice into English. I’m sure that in Mexico, Dorantes’s experiment is important and inflammatory. In English, much of it reads as over-the-plate post-LANG post-lyricism, with enough conventional imagery thrown in (“If we were to be gleaming daggers”; “then I take one of Dawn’s hands”) to make one ponder Dorantes’s claim that “any writer who finds it necessary to exorcise Neruda in order to feel liberated must go to extremes.” If Neruda’s your litmus, these are probably wild. For an audience attuned to Ashbery, Hejinian, Weiner and Stein, the pleasures are real but maybe a little milder.

EMENDATION: Had the pleasure of seeing Dorantes read since writing the above, and better understand the forces at work in her poems. The intention seems less to "be wild," or simply anti-Nerudan, than to say something difficult and true. Difficult because true: lyrical yet not "decorated," accurate and deeply felt.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Full review posted on The Rumpus) Her poetry strips away the debris and the generic to the hard core which cannot be reduced. Sometimes when I approach one of her poems I feel like I’ve landed in a clearing–or on the surface of the moon. At times abstract (and a little cryptic), her work struck me as being quiet, deftly crafted, and sharp as a knife.

[Steve]

http://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2007/...