Immanent Visitor

Book excerpt: "Immanent Visitor is a triumphant procession of that hallucinated angel, Jaime Saenz, carried into English by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander."—Eliot Weinberger "The appearance of Jaime Saenz in English is a major event for all of us who live and write within that language. In this authoritative selection and translation by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson he enters the imagination of North America—a later but crucial member of the pantheon of west coast South American poets that includes Neruda, Vallejo, Huidobro, and Parra. The poetry is relentless and the genius of the man who made it inescapable. For a poetry of awakening and terror, this is the place to look."—Jerome Rothenberg "These poems in translation are a revelation, a masterful conceit. 'Reading Saenz we are struck awake into a surging, polyphonic language of unstable, rapid transitions,' the poet/translators say, and so it is: a plain of shifting verbal sands, Saenz unfolds in their hands. The poem and the reader are both kept off-balance until they levitate into a trance, el momento of fusion where poetry begins. It is a great thing to witness this translation as event, the coming of Saenz into a new 'us,' a moment when poetry can be read as 'ours,' meaning 'north and south connected.' This is nuestra poesía."—Cecilia Vicuña, author of The Precarious/Quipoem: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña