Join us for in celebrating the recent release of Brent Armendinger's 'Street Gloss' at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, featuring readings from Argentinian poet Mercedes Roffé, poet and translator Alexis Almeida, and Ana Luisa Amaral, representing New Directions, in NYC from Portugal!

About STREET GLOSS: In this experimental translingual work, Brent Armendinger follows the work of five contemporary Argentinian poets into the streets of Buenos Aires, attempting to map the ways a word might be an echo of the city itself. Interested in the surface areas of language and the generative potential of failure in translation, the author follows a set of procedures oriented simultaneously in the lines as well as in the streets of the city, gathering impressions, associations, and language through unpredictable encounters with the place and its inhabitants. Notes from these encounters appear interlaced, here, between the original poems in Spanish and their translations. Featuring poems by Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi, and artwork by Alpe Romero.

ABOUT OUR READERS:

Brent Armendinger's new book is STREET GLOSS, a hybrid work of site-specific poetry and experimental translation, featuring Argentinian writers Alejandro Méndez, Mercedes Roffé, Fabián Casas, Néstor Perlongher, and Diana Bellessi, and drawings by Alpe Romero (The Operating System, 2019). Brent is also the author of The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. He teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles.

MERCEDES ROFFÉ is one of Argentina’s leading poets. Widely published in Latin America and Spain, some of her books have been published in translation in Italy, Quebec, Romania, France, Brasil, England and the United States. Her books in English translation include Floating Lanterns (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2016; transl. by Anna Deeny), and Ghost Opera (Chicago, co-im-press, 2017; transl. by Judith Filc). Roffé is the founding editor of Ediciones Pen Press, a New York-based independent press dedicated to the publication of contemporary poetry from around the world. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2001) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2012).

Alexis Almeida is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti's Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues, 2018), and Single Mother (Spork, 2019). She currently teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College and at the Bard microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library. She lives in New York and runs 18 Owls Press.

ANA LUÍSA AMARAL was born in Lisbon, in 1956, and lives in Leça da Palmeira. She has written poetry, plays, children’s books, books of essays and a novel. She has translated poets such as Emily Dickinson, John Updike or William Shakespeare. Her books have been published in several countries, such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico or the United States. Theatre plays have been based around her poetry and her books for children. She has received various prizes and awards, among them the Premio Correntes d’Escritas/Casino da Póvoa, the Grande Prémio de Poesia APE (Portuguese Association of Writers), the Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award, the Premio Internazionale Fondazione Roma, or the PEN Prize for Fiction. Her name has twice been put forward for the Premio Reina Sofia. She taught for many years at the University of Porto, from which she received her Ph.D. on Emily Dickinson, and where her academic research centred around Comparative Poetics, Feminist Studies and Queer Theory. She has also coordinated several international projects. She is on the board of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, where she coordinates the research strand “Intersexualities”. She has edited several academic books, such as New Portuguese Letters to the World (Peter Lang, 2015). She currently co-hosts a weekly radio program on national radio on poetry, O som que os versos fazem ao abrir. In 2019, a book of essays on her work, entitled Beauty and Resistance in the Poetry of Ana Luísa Amaral, will be published in the UK (ed. Claire Williams).

Hosted / Curated by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson.