Even Time Bleeds is a revelatory selection of the work of Jeannette Clariond, a major contemporary Mexican poet known for her sensuous lyricism and philosophical gravity. Translated and introduced by Pulitzer Prize鈥搘inning poet Forrest Gander, this volume gathers poems from across Clariond鈥檚 career and presents the English translations and the original Spanish texts on facing pages. Whether writing about science or Romanticism, childhood or the Chihuahua Desert, ancient Mexican myths or the pandemic of Mexican femicides, Clariond displays a complex self-consciousness that captures much about contemporary identity in Mexico and beyond. Born in 1949 into a Lebanese family that emigrated to Mexico, Clariond has spent much of her life traveling between Mexico, the United States, and Spain, and she writes about varieties of exile and the fearsome complexity of the US鈥揗exican border with rare insight. Even rarer: she gives voice to her own interiority in a way that is accessible and piercing, as though her true country is inside of each reader.
Jeannette L. Clariond is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers. Forrest Gander is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator whose most recent book of poems is Mojave Ghost. His many translations include Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda and It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho.
"To read Jeannette L. Clariond’s Even Time Bleeds—a bilingual selection from across the Lebanese Mexican writer’s career, pairing Spanish originals with Forrest Gander’s lucid translations—is to meet a poet who has perfected poems at every scale. . . . [T]he primary impression left by Even Time Bleeds is one of supersaturated surplus, of a poet who can reinvigorate genres as timeworn as the landscape poem, the creation myth, the family elegy."鈥擟hristopher Spaide, Literary Hub
"Even Time Bleeds, a new anthology of award winning Mexican Poet Jeannette Lozano Clariond’s poetry translated by American poet Forrest Gander, compresses and chops over two decades of highly structured poetics into a choreographed 140 pages. Between the gnostic aphorisms of Ammonites are increasingly contemporary works whose own Gnosticism invokes Wallace Stevens and Octavio Paz."鈥擩ustin D. Goodman, Compulsive Reader
"Clariond is a poet of immense vision, whose poems startle the mind as much as they do the body. . . . The poems in English are heady and moving, printed alongside the Spanish, which allows you to cross borders in record time. In a day and age where the world feels ever-closer to ending, we need more writers and translators like Jeannette L. Clariond and Forrest Gander to remind us that the way we choose to view the world makes all the difference."鈥擬att Schroeder, Blackbird
"Beautiful, thoughtful, well-translated, and relevant."鈥擳om Bowden, The Book Beat
“Clariond's poetry reminds us that imagination keeps watch over reality, that reality itself is asleep, and that only her poetry is capable of waking it. Poetry, in this sense, is not so much the poem, but the primitive vision that the poet questions with her sensitivity, imagination, and hope. Hers is a voice that imagines, dreams, and feels at the same time; and so her poetry thinks.”—Adonis, winner of the Goethe Prize and the PEN/Nabokov Award
“I would give it all up just to write, for example, these two lines that comprise the extraordinary conclusion to one of her poems: ‘Sangra en el vidrio, / astillada, la claridad’ (Bleeding on the glass, / splintered, the clarity).”—Gonzalo Rojas, winner of the Cervantes Prize and the Reina Sof铆a Prize
