Intact

Claudia Masin is one of the most original voices surging forth from contemporary Argentine poetry. And now English-language readers have the moment to experience the electric lurch once a body is brought back from death, all thanks to the lucidity, accuracy, and unflinching probity from one of our most talented contemporary translators and poets, Robin Myers. Intact opens with poems kicking up the dust of some other existence, where we-the readers, Myers, Masin-are no longer locked in our bodies, or aren't even members of our species, but somewhere else, a space of yearning. We enter the language in Myers' spellbinding English, as one enters pain that proves to be a beautiful landscape. The overarching architecture that builds the collection's narrative thrust is a suite of films. The films provide clips, texts, and tableaux by such diverse directors as Abel Ferrara, Ingmar Bergman, and even Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson. (Poetry lovers and cinephiles, Masin's book beckons you!) And just as images flicker in the dark against the silver screen, the poetry in this book, stirring in the estuary between Spanish and English, in that magical space that can never be precisely discerned, in what can never be touched, yet unearths memories from earliest childhood, and before. Call it music. Call it poetry. 

--Anthony Seidman, translator of CONTRA NATURA, by Rodolfo Hinostroza 

Masin inhabits language with the ease of a stream, but she follows the frenetic rhythm of a stormy sea. It's no exaggeration to say that each of these poems is a universe unto itself, a space that demands new eyes. Stop there, don't move, and let her words look back at you. Can you see how they pulse, how they urge us to behold the blade of language, of the imagination?

--Isabel Zapata, author of IN VITRO