Attention Span – Erin Mouré

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Torques: Drafts 58-76 | Salt | 2007

A persistent willingness to engage and not flinch. To see the world and the forces, challenges in it in ways that step outside the usual American version of world.

Wilson Bueno | A copista de Kafka | São Paulo: Planeta de Brasil | 2007

An American poet, in the other sense, the one in which Americans are south of the equator and we are North Americans. Brazilian, from the borderlands where Spanish and Portuguese are mixed, though this novel is in Portuguese.

VA | Radical Translation Issue | dANDelion Vol.33 No.2 | December 2007

Brief essays from 4 Canadian poets working in and through translation: Robert Majzels, myself, Oana Avasilichioaei and Angela Carr, plus other poems, from Nicole Brossard among others. From a conference organized at the University of Calgary by Robert Majzels in 2007.

Georges Didi-Hubermann | Devant le temps | Paris: Minuit | 2000

The time of the image is anachronic! I read this book in Spanish translation as the original was always out of the library.

VA | Barbara Guest Issue | Chicago Review 53:4-54:1/2 | Summer 2008

Guest always brings me joy, shows me how it is done, how persist is, how works work in time and words.

Phil Hall | White Porcupine | BookThug | 2007

The elusive dream animal, visceral. Cadence and narration in ways that few can understand narration. And our own animal. Read it!

Alice Notley | In the Pines | Penguin| 2007

Because of the way she can deal with subjectivity, the subject constituting itself in private, in public spaces, and over and over again, not an incomplete subject but one in motion against death and ruinous politics. And the way she works with narrative, image.

Chus Pato | Hordas de Escritura | Vigo: Xerais | 2008

A Galician poet, author of Charenton (Shearsman, 2006), how she works at blinding speed and utterly destroys the poem while writing poetry.

César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshleman | The Complete Poetry | California | 2007

A monumental work, amazing project, the dedication of a life, and even if I want to retranslate some of the poems to free Vallejo from Eshleman, it’s amazing. You see not only Vallejo here, risen whole, but the consistency of Eshleman’s reading, how he reads, what he sees when he reads lines of poetry. In 1983, Eshleman’s Collected Posthumous Poems of Vallejo changed my life. This complete volume seems to contain my own poetic history too. Strange, wonderful.

C. D. Wright | Rising, Falling, Hovering | Copper Canyon | 2008

This is one of the few American poets who has moved across the boundary and can see things outside of the mental enclosure in which most American thinking happens. An antidote in lyric, corrupting form, realizing narration’s sinews.

Giorgio Agamben | Homo Sacer | Seuil | 1995

Agamben’s thinking on how concentration camps can happen. “The biopolitial paradigm of the West today is the camp and not the city.” Essential reading for us all in an age when the camp has already torn the pointer off our moral compass (not just Guantánamo but the camps for illegal immigrants in Europe).