Overview

Step into a book that keeps asking the question most poetry never dares to touch: what if the ""bottom of things"" isn't where we think it is? These selections from Roberto Juarroz's lifelong masterpiece, Vertical Poetry, are a fierce, lucid meditation on consciousness, existence, and the flimsy borders we draw around reality. Here, life and death, presence and absence, self and world are not opposites but mirrors; the poems ask what lies beyond these tidy dualities, and what happens when they collapse. Juarroz's lines stage strange, unforgettable moments: hands that build the man they belong to, thoughts that leak into the world like rain, language that dissolves into a silence more eloquent than any word. Again and again, he goes searching for the ""untranslatable song,"" the reverse side of light and sound where meaning hides in what's missing. This collection invites the reader toward an impossible meeting point, where the gaze of the living crosses that of the dead, where the possible and the impossible briefly recognize each other. In that new, unclaimed space beyond time, Vertical Poetry doesn't just describe reality; it quietly, radically rewrites it.

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9781965784518

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Roberto Juarroz (1925-1995) was an influential Argentine poet and librarian, best known for his lifelong series of books all titled Poesía vertical (Vertical Poetry). Beyond his writing, Juarroz had a distinguished career in library science. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and studied documentation at the Sorbonne. He later directed the Department of Library Science at the University of Buenos Aires and worked for UNESCO. Unlike ""horizontal"" poetry that might follow narrative or descriptive flow, Juarroz's ""vertical"" style aimed to drill deep into the core of existence, seeking the absolute through a metaphysical and philosophical lens. He published 14 volumes under the title Poesía vertical (numbered from first to fourteenth), treating his entire body of work as a single, evolving book. His poems are typically short, unrhymed, and numbered rather than titled. He stripped language down to its essentials, often exploring themes of silence, the ""gaze"" (la mirada), and the paradoxes of thought. Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); and the winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize for his book, A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds & Nature. His other works include The Map of Eternity (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2018), Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir (The Operating System, 2018), and On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays (Adelaide Books, 2018). His poems and prose have appeared in Adelaide Literary Journal; The American Book Review; Appalachia Journal; Arts: The Arts in Theological and Religious Studies; Chiron Review, Crab Orchard Review; The Galway Review (Ireland); North American Review; Still Point Arts Quarterly; and Transference: A Literary Journal Featuring the Art and Process of Translation.

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