Reviews
“An exploration of familial history and memory, a consideration of how meaning is constructed through words, the book moves increasingly toward interior monologues that excavate a writer’s mind at work: “Swimming is pushing water, the same way / we push words.” As the poems grow progressively sparser, they let in light and liquid shadows, with lines that are in conversation with Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”: “I say blue—that’s / what water looks like at first // the tone falls apart.” Translator Jasmine V. Bailey’s poetic sensibilities shine at junctures where etymology tangles with syntax, these translations unfold naturally, finding rhythms that feel crisp and completely at home in English.”
Read excerpts at Two Lines and the Brooklyn Rail.
Selected by Ilya Kaminsky as a Finalist for the Gulf Coast Translation Prize
Translated from Spanish by Jasmine V. Bailey
Mangrove forests grow on coastlines, with root systems that hold them upright in the unstable grounds where land and water meet. That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove draws on the in-between nature of these trees to explore spaces between— between a foot and the floor, a cup of coffee and its dish, a face and the shoulder of a couple on a motorbike. These are poems that dwell in the tidal movement between saying and what’s left unsaid.
"Silvina López Medin has a very distinct, absolutely refreshing poetics. She observes desire and consciousness through an empowered and conscientious voice that feels both authentic and astute. Her poems are both grounded and philosophical, displaying gifts for meditative movement and structure, and amazing turns of phrase. They wonderfully deconstruct and mull notions of domestic intimacy. Her poems shape a sensibility that is both natural and speculative, contemplative and wild."
—TERRANCE HAYES
“There is something epical to this work's world view, however much it might deny it. Beautiful work. Yes, sorrowful and beautiful."
—ILYA KAMINSKY