Bøger i Bridges serien

This work inaugurates a series of individual books of poetry in bilingual editions, written by Mexican and American authors. María Ángeles Juárez Téllez is a daughter of the natural heart of México, where volcanoes and lava forged valleys of stone and ashes where the people of Michoacán have raised lavish orchards of citrus and avocados for generations. In the fire of time rescues from the entrails of her body and mind the flames that have tattooed the author inside and out: the adult world of her childhood, the neverending concerns of love and heartbreak, the instinctive and sometimes futile attempt to grasp her daughter, a mockingbird with the voice of her mother, the gush of light of the Michoacán landscape, the metaphor of life that trains are, and a heretical view of the New Testament. Hers is a full-bodied voice with a particular aesthetic that is born of her continuous study of language. This conveys beauty to each page, with the poet's pacing, a clock-like mechanism that makes each poem work. Herein, we are unpretentiously made privy to her extensive readings and her assimilation of the work of great writers, such as López Velarde's national vision and the mourning luminosities of Villaurrutia; the mystique of the God-fearing John of the Cross; or the fervent poetry of Concha Urquiza. In several of her poems, especially toward the end of the book, the author leads us through parables and biblical passages, testing our faith in the Scriptures, stripping or providing them with the sacred at will, impersonating herself in creative goddess form. It is not that María Ángeles Juárez plays in her verses with some tainted practices of her religion, but that by knowing the power of its ritual symbols and invocations, she is able to transmute men into flesh angels. María Ángeles Juárez drinks from many literary streams in a natural and fertile way. Her voice is clear, strong, beautiful and mature. She leaves in her wake many crackling traces-metaphors and verses of fire. They are evidence that shows us where we must look to find her.

The poet must find new words, new images, new forms to move us. In the first part of Am I my Brother's Keeper?, Bernard Block addresses injustice, poverty or discrimination, attempting to touch us and arouse us to profound issues otherwise buried in the avalanche of "breaking news". The brightness of his language illuminates and dignifies the victims of tragic events, leaving a trail of sparks that lasts beyond the poem. In the second part of this book, the poet arrives-or begins-as playing, to conjugate the language of infancy and war of the children, in verses inspired by Wordsworth's vision of childhood ironically mixed with surrealism and the language of Dada, of post World War I Europe. There the reader will find nostalgia, intimations of loss, apparitions in the mist. In the final part of Am I my Brother's Keeper? Who are we?: a spider, a king, a wall, a soldier, a sherpa, a child of the sea, the Rose of Tacloban. There are no answers. Bernard Block attempts to write "engaged" poetry inspired by Walt Whitman's "Poetry from the people, for the people" or perhaps Percy Bysshe Shelley, who In Defense of Poetry wrote: "Poetry animated by political events, a Visionary Poetry that inspires, shapes politics and alters lives. Visionary Poetry as an advanced guard of moral awakening."

The attribute of the misfit is to live out of time and against the current. In Postmodern Valladolid the Mexican poet Raúl Casamadrid insists on exercising such a strange way of life. He has stood against the habits of his time (hedonism, the unbridled desire to be right, the urgency of innovation, the vulgar stolidity) and walks cautiously, slowly, by streets that are re-invented instances of memory, along avenues that become circular prisons. Raúl composes among alleys, empty lots, withered colonial portals, small squares, cemeteries, fountains, hotel rooms, bridges, walls that have seen executions and misery, hidden gardens and sewers. Everything can relate to everything in his city. His verses do not condescend for, nor profess any specific aesthetic. Raúl composes at his own pace, standing. He refuses to be the demiurge poet, the architect, the little god who ruminates about boring immortality. He has chosen to be the man of the street who writes poems that are not the luxury object of the bourgeois but, as the anti-poet says, they are "a product of prime necessity." Postmodern Valladolid, bilingual edition, is the sixth poetry book of Darklight's Bridges Series, which intends to connect two different cultures and languages that nevertheless share universal artistic values.

Conjunction of floral (vertical) vegetality and amphibian (horizontal) animality, celebration of the mythical and human duality, the translational and rotational movement of the poems of Axolotl Constellation is a concentric trip without return of the poet inside himself, and an eccentric flight in the flesh of the woman, the place of writing where the everlasting carnal passions of the poet tattoo the perennial traces of his amatory and vital transmutation. DARKLIGHT PUBLISHING LLC, was established in New York City to disseminate the poetic work of American and Latin American authors. The bilingual "Bridges" series was conceived by writers from both countries based on their knowledge of poetry as a genre, as well as an interest in their own language in relation to the other, and its books include contemporary authors seeking readers that move through our geographic hemisphere in physical or virtual ways, and throughout our neighboring countries, where there is a broad exchange between English and Spanish languages.

IN THIS COLLECTION OF POEMS, the reader will find the watermarks of a real, imaginary and fantastic city that beats beneath the sidewalks, in the sun, in the wind that knocks the trees down, in the reflection of the light in the puddles after the rain. Iliana Rodríguez knows how to delineate with words the solicitations, the elusive messages that draws in the streets the night "of long avenues / as expectations"; the trees, whose "mineral blood drags / the dark secrets"; the wind, which destroys and transforms; and even the inhabitants of the city, who turn into figures in her poems, into ink signs of a dance sometimes luminous and sometimes dark: "Maybe you're a shadow. / A pencil stroke / blotted out by the winds." The poet writes: "I would like to decipher / the ideogram of my palm: / the sign that defines. / Then I watch my hand / tracing / these words / with its brush." Her hand thus becomes a brush, and her fingers form a drawing in the poems of Trace in which we recognize ourselves. Iliana Rodríguez, a growing voice in the poetry of Mexico, makes the signs of the city and the world turn around in her threshold of water and light, in these poems.

Songs of Mute Eagles -represents the second in an ongoing series of bilingual poetry collections published by Darklight Publishing LLC. Arthur Gatti, the poet whose work fills this rich book of images, is a New Yorker in every sense of the word. Throughout his life, he has acquainted himself with characters and places-currents that make up the body of contemporary American counterculture and pop culture. And, like many American journalists and writers, he has traveled his country chasing ideas, jobs and romance, while accumulating images and priceless experiences that over the years he has turned into poems. In this book there are tributes to the artistic currents from which the author was nourished - the "macho" poets Rudyard Kipling and Robert Service, Japanese haiku, Jack Kerouac and jazz music- as well as loving reflections on moments that move us just for being human. Art Gatti's poems exude the city, losses and reunions, observations of the tiny and the grandiose, the mournful evocation of the extinct, and they have a smoldering predilection for iconoclastic chaos. Gatti reflects several facets of the contemporary Renaissance man, writing poems with a devilish intent to engage the reader in their intricate verbal labyrinths, with complex analogies of double and triple meanings rising from the page like concentric clouds. Here are a few lines of Art Gatti's poem Small Daily Ration of Sunlight In darkness, all my familiar tones are a pallet/ inside a dark membrane/ that pulsates/ and tries to burst into some life force/ that is just a shadowy midmorning dream/ and can never be. And his poem, Red Song: The wail of some jazz man's horn/ reaches over the twilight/ weaving through brittle branches- dead apple trees of my blood's yearnings- to me/ in this cold and dying ember/ fireplace room where/ my face suddenly glows hotly/ thinking of you. DARKLIGHT PUBLISHING LLC, was established in New York City to disseminate the poetic work of American and Latin American authors through bilingual editions. Translation and editing is in the capable hands of teams of poets in Mexico and the United States. The bilingual "Bridges" series was conceived by writers from both countries based on their knowledge of poetry as a genre, as well as an interest in their own language in relation to the other, and its books will include contemporary authors seeking readers that move through our geographic hemisphere in physical or virtual ways, and throughout our neighboring countries, where there is a broad exchange between the English and Spanish languages. "Songs of Mute Eagles", bilingual edition, was translated into Spanish and edited by Arthur Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala; it contains beautiful illustrations by Laurie Anderson, Antonio Carmelo Gatti, Michael Hartnett, Alethea Maguire-Cruz and Paul Oratofsky, and has a cover designed by the graphic artist Alonso Venegas Gómez based on an illustration by Alethea Maguire-Cruz.