Bound Together :: Lindsay Turner / Victoria Cóccaro (tr. Rebekah Smith)
/
THE MANUSCRIPT
Victoria Cóccaro’s long poem, The Sea, is made up of names waiting to be conjured on the page—human names and place names, the act of writing lovingly and sensually defined, moving like a wave through consciousness. The sea, not only with its movements and with its sound, but also with its rays and reflections. The present before it dissolves. The orchestra that practices every afternoon in your head, but that no one else hears. In this poem, Cóccaro investigates a world distilled, vaporized, and once again condensed in a new space, where time goes on simultaneously with its influences and recesses, tides and colored fish waiting to be discovered at the bottom of the sea. This is a poem of discovery, of a sea made up of naming, inside a book, a book that like a life, sleeps, until no more.
THE AUTHOR
Victoria Cóccaro is a writer from Buenos Aires, author of poetry books, essays and contemporary opera. Her opera-poem Decir was premiered with music by Francisco del Pino in the Teatro Argentino Experimentation Center in July 2019. Other pieces intersecting music and poetry such as Cave/Cueva (2021) and The Sea (2022) have been presented at Princeton University. She is the creator and curator of the sound and poetry reading cycle Procesadores de textos. PhD in Literature (University of Buenos Aires), she studied Experimental Opera (UNTREF and Williams’ Winter School). She teaches Creative Writing at the National University of Arts. Her last book on Latin American art and literary criticism Qué está vivo? / What is alive? was published in 2023 (Miño y Dávila). Her current research project conducted in the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) covers intertwinings between Literature and Music. Find her online at https://victoriacoccaro.com.ar
THE TRANSLATOR
Rebekah Smith is a writer, translator, and editor. She is the translator of Susana Thénon’s Ova Completa (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), and the recipient of a 2024 NEA Literature Fellowship in Translation.
Cóccaro Excerpt
if you start to think
the likeness between a brain and a tree
or between a brain and the bottom of the sea
but it’s not there in the images
nor in the results of the analysis on Mondays
not even in the long faces of the doctors
nor in the transparent compassion of the bartenders
no it’s not in the others
who are in the waiting room awaiting a nameless hope
waiting for nothing
nothing is what happens in a brain
nothing is an electrical storm
when the equation isn’t written
THE MANUSCRIPT
Deep in a rainy Southern winter, the small jewels of Lindsay Turner’s prose poems shimmer and refract. Each poem is a dense knot of observation, sound, and feeling. Each poem is a downhill run through thick undergrowth, propelled by gravity while tugged-at and stung by bramble and vine. In A Fortnight, Turner’s poems glitter with a marvelous sensitivity to shifts in the light, in the language, in the mist that rises between reader, text, and world. Simultaneously meditations on place and records of work in the kingdom of words (as a reader, as a writer), these poems transmit their quietly thrilling songs.
THE AUTHOR
A poet, critic, and translator, Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. Her translation of Bouquet's The Next Loves was longlisted for the National Translation Awards, shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and named a New York Times top 10 poetry collection of 2019, and she has twice received French Voices Grants for her translation work. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University.
Turner Excerpt
[you call that desire]
gets jungly out here in June in the backyard slipped the window shades of shone or shinèd leaf combine like you thought you’d dreamed them here the leaves made outlines of a row of eyes parallel on lengthy branches of the shrub or tree I don’t know the attachment from the secrecy of not knowing you call that desire I don’t really don’t know anything else to tell the light or green then quicker heartbeat or the breeze my heart beats faster when the words pick up but when it’s still I can see it more for itself
Books will ship in late February 2024. To order copies of this book outside the US and its territories, please email us at doublecrosspress@gmail.com for international shipping costs.