A fresh batch of micro-reviews from Kenyon Review is up, ranging among the most urgent books in translation published over the last several months, including Grenade in Mouth, by Miyó Vestrini. Highlights include:
“It’s hard for me to read Grenade in Mouth, the inaugural English translation of avant-garde Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini, without hearing the echo of co-translator Anne Boyer’s essay ‘No.’ Boyer writes, ‘Death as refusal requires as its material only life, which if rendered cheaply enough by the conditions that inspire the refusal, can become precious again when selectively and heroically deployed as a no.'”
and
“Some readers may see Vestrini’s work as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that culminates in its author’s death. For me, Grenade in Mouth is more interesting for its unresolvable tensions, exalting in decadence and austerity, joy and horror, and refusal and revolution.”
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