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Queridos amigos,
aquí algunas palabras, blurbs y reseñas que han aparecido a propósito de “Bluebird and Other Tattoos”. Thank you very very very much.
<3
Via The Scrambler y Goodreads.
“I’ve been a fan of Luna Miguel’s work for a few years now, starting when I stumbled across her blog in my senior year of high school. I was craving something contemporary in Spanish, to read and digest and translate during the multiple empty hours of the school day. I still have some printed-out pages from DVDediciones’ website, where I’d scrawled some hand-written translations of her poems.
So I was ecstatic to hear about Luna’s publication Tenían veinte años y estaban locos, in which she is editor. I had followed the tumblr for months, and bought the book as soon as it was released.
And now, Luna’s first publication to the English-speaking world: Bluebird and Other Tattoos. I really devoured these poems. The collection is broken up conveniently into time-periods, which allows the reader to follow along in the development of both Luna’s voice, and also the theme which seems to be most deeply embedded in her poems: sickness. Sickness of soul and sickness of body and sickness of culture. Luna’s poems have put me on a kind of hunt, so that now I see sickness everywhere. And that’s what I consider to be a truly successful collection. I can only strongly recommend it.
That (quite gushingly) said, I do have some reservations about the English translations. However, I’m confident that the quality of translation in future publications will be addressed mindfully, and I would still recommend Luna’s collection to those looking to read only the translations.”(Kevin Cole)
“Luna Miguel is a poet who can make me cry. Her passion for life and for poetry is uncommon. She makes language concise, supple, and exciting again. Recurring images: of birds, disease, spit, and blood, integral to a mortal, embodied poetry that reminds us ‘Death cannot be experienced neither for the living nor the dead but for the sick.’ Luna writes a poem, ‘The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.’ She writes, ‘I exist, therefore, / then I tremble.’ She writes of the suicidal poets, she writes of all women, she writes of the young. She writes knowing it’s a lie, she lives in the shadow of death. Luna writes of her ‘unprotected life,’ her ‘unprotected diary.’ There is no comfort in this poetry, there is hard beauty. ‘The wind was this. Being born was this. Dying without dying and without a disease was this. To tell you the truth: I am here and I need you.’ Luna.”
(Stephen Tully Dierks)
“Luna Miguel has given us a world of birds with purposes.
Birds to eat, birds that ejaculate on prostitutes, birds that
mock and birds that mourn. Birds that live in monotonous
places and birds made of ink. The birds of Luna’s poetry do
something or see something or are something and like the
poet herself give us a brilliant insight to an otherwise sorry
world.”
(Kendra Grant Malone)
“Luna is great. There are no poems like hers. She carries
herself through them like some ageless spirit of unchecked
wisdom, but she doesn’t tell you what she knows. If I read
this book six thousand years from now in a different body on
a different planet, I still wouldn’t know what Luna knows.
How is she so damn smart?”
(Matthew Savoca)
“Like other sublime things, Luna Miguel’s Bluebird and Other
Tattoos acts in several emotional hemispheres at once:
tongues, brains, bloods, a darker comfort, a good pale wood,
fields of nettles, fingertips, several sorts of well-kept flesh,
pulsation, relief. “I have seen my generation renounce
literature,” she writes. “I have seen it and I am not
interested.” Assured yet compassionate, stark yet starving,
what comes through in these poems is a great sense of heat
like intense sun, and focused as a score of skin-rendered lines
born under pressure, calm like why “The neon always hits my
shirt / and crosses the crystals / of the transport in which I
habit… I hear the dizziness of who does not travel… Here
panic does not exist.””
(Blake Butler)
“Some planets have rings around them. Luna has words. While
reading her book, I imagined birds rotating around her and
herself spinning around each word.”
(Ana Carrete)“by far the best poetry book i have read in a very long time. luna is such a lovely person, so it makes sense her verse should be as well. luna’s words and imagery remind me of some of my favorite writers (fernando pessoa, charles bukowski, bolano) and yet are uniquely her own. i really enjoyed all of the literary quotes, as well as having the original spanish versions side-by-side with the translated verse. a new all-time favorite, most definitely.”
(Hannah Lee)
(via popserial)
