The Odd Month
Published on 26. December 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
90 pages
978-1-939568-91-5 (ISBN)
Description
A collection of 29 ecopoetic vignettes that explore the complexities of politics and progress in the Global South.
Known colloquially as "the odd month" for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season's crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law-of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity-attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
Known colloquially as "the odd month" for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season's crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law-of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity-attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
Reviews / Votes
"Valeria Meiller's poems in The Odd Month bless us twice. First, they bless us through the excellent, matter-of-fact transparencies of their language. And second, through what that language evokes-the vividness of the mind at its finest pitch and what that mind vividly sees and understands. A moody, gripping, brilliant book." -Vijay Seshadri"The Odd Month is a stunning volume of prose poetry constructed of a multilayered world of different spaces and times. . . . Whitney DeVos's skilled translation successfully brings into English this imaginary layer of existence, conjuration, and possibility."-Manuela Luengas, World Literature in Translation
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 191 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-939568-91-5 (9781939568915)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Valeria Meiller is an Argentine writer and scholar who is assistant professor of social and environmental challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the author of four collections of poetry in Spanish.
Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard as well as a cotranslator of Carlos Soto Roman's 11 and Hugo Garcia Manriquez's Commonplace / Lo comun. With Valeria Meiller and Javiera Perez-Salerno, she coedits Ruge el bosque, a series of regional ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. A 2022 NEA fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.
Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard as well as a cotranslator of Carlos Soto Roman's 11 and Hugo Garcia Manriquez's Commonplace / Lo comun. With Valeria Meiller and Javiera Perez-Salerno, she coedits Ruge el bosque, a series of regional ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. A 2022 NEA fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.