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Bridges is a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events. The concrete presence of the bridges, with names such as Pueyrredón, La Noria, Avellaneda, among others, marks the limits of the capital city and the beginning of the periphery surrounding it, characterized by a vastly different landscape. In Genovese's historical memory, many scenes from her childhood and adolescence merge with the revolts and uprising of the Peronist working class and the repressive military dictatorship.
Buenos Aires is sometimes said, with a shrug or a wistful sigh, to “turn its back” on its river: as if the city goes about its business without a palpable sense of communion with the water that defines it. Alicia Genovese’s long poem Puentes, tenderly translated by Daniel Coudriet as Bridges, does the very opposite. In one evocative scene after another, Genovese crosses both literal and metaphorical bridges to explore the transformations in a landscape, a family, an era, and a self over time, uttering “nomenclatures / that refuse / the anonymity / of a non-place / and affirm / a unique space / with a skidding / of images passed by, / returned in perception.” Coudriet’s translation of this rich work flows along as whole and complex as the body of a river: gentle, formidable, sonorous, full of surprises. —Robin Myers
Alicia Genovese’s poignant meditation on bridges understands them in all their complexity—sometimes as link, sometimes as obstacle, always as “both precarious and solid.” Holding the sweet and the bitter gracefully suspended on either side, Genovese probes our imperfect impulse to connect and to keep moving, to find solutions that then turn into problems. “A bridge is a leap and an ellipsis,” she tells us. Rarely has this in-between space been so movingly limned. —Donna Stonecipher
ABOUT THE AUTOR: Alicia Genovese is a writer born in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lives in the city of Buenos Aires and spends long periods in the Delta del Tigre. She has published more than twelve books of poetry, one novel, and three books of essays. She has received several awards and honors, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Literary Prize, and the First Municipal Prize of the Government of Buenos Aires. She is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), where she teaches poetry courses as part of the Literary Arts Program.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR: Daniel Coudriet lives with his wife and son in Richmond, Virginia, and Carcarañá, Argentina. He is the author of Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and Parade (Blue Hour Press, 2012). His poetry and translations of Argentine poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Circumference, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Mandorla, Massachusetts Review, Washington Square, and elsewhere. His work as a literary translator was previously supported by an NEA fellowship.