Overview

The Aral Sea, or Sea of Islands, was a vast lake on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan which has now all but disappeared since the Soviet government diverted the lake's two main feeder rivers in the 1960s, in order to try to irrigate the desert. This quixotic plan was a tragic failure: the local environment has been irreversibly altered. Sonia Bueno, a young Spanish poet with a complicated relation to her country (she is from the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla), travelled to the Aral Sea in the early 2010s to see one of the world's worst man-made climate disasters. Aral is her account of this journey, to a shrunken lake, a growing desert, and the human ruins that surround them. Written in an oblique, fragmentary style, these poems are a collection of impressions of an environment that is hard for the mind to grasp. Translated into English by the poet and translator James Womack, this is a collection which is unafraid to pose far-reaching and complicated questions.

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9781916232112

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'This book uses language in a radical fashion. But the word radical has two meanings: extreme or experimental , and also related to the root of things . This book offers us the word rooted in the depths of our subconscious, before it touches the conscious and begins to tarnish.' Carlos Izquierdo 'Her language is full of fishbones.' Aldo Alcota

Author Information

Sonia Bueno was born in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla in 1976. She works with the literary collective Lavarca ebria, whose remit is to investigate the possibility of the word and its relation with other arts. She has published two collections of poetry: retales (leftovers, which won the Premio Internacional de Poesía Fundación Centro de Poesía José Hierro in 2011) and Aral (2016). She has published poems in literary magazines in Spain and abroad, including the English-language magazine The Wolf. She was an invited reader at the 49th Rotterdam Poetry International in 2018. She lives in Madrid. James Womack is a poet and translator. He teaches Spanish, Russian, translation, English and study skills at Cambridge University, where he is a bye-fellow at Fitzwilliam College. He is the author of two collections of poetry, and the translator of two others, as well as of a large number of miscellaneous works (novels, self-help books, business manuals &c.)

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