Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
The Sadness of Shadows by Lola Ancira (translated by Juana Adcock)
Lola Ancira’s third short story collection, and the first to be translated into English, gives voice to those who have been marginalised and condemned to live life in the shadows of lunacy, nostalgia, loss and desperation. The protagonists, defeated by life itself, find refuge in abandonment, in forgotten premises, in dejection and in the memory of what they once had.
From a mother suffering from the loss of her first and only child, to failed revolutionaries and women locked away for ‘non-conformity’, this collection explores the debilitating power of the state, of society and even of the family as it is exercised over the individual.
The psychiatric hospital ‘La Castañeda’, the most notorious mental health facility in Mexican history, and the prison ‘The Palace of Lecumberri’, the most notorious penal institution in Mexican history, are the spaces that ultimately hold these protagonists’ destinies and where these twelve stories are set. Juana Adcock’s faithful and shockingly evocative translation lets us enter worlds that, though they no longer exist, continue to live on and cast their shadows upon the modern world.
A Country Girl, A Big Girl by Ryan Cogley
Kitty Murphy is an eleven-year-old, high-spirited young girl growing up in 1950s Ireland. When her elder sister leaves the family farm to attend school, Kitty must step into her shoes and become the ‘Big Girl’ – i.e., rear her siblings, manage chores, etc. Kitty struggles to satisfy all the expectations placed on her and her childhood innocence suffers as a result. Throughout the year, awful things happen to the Murphys – their father contracts cancer, their mother suffers a stillbirth, and their eldest sister goes missing after a pregnancy. With all this misery, Kitty must find strength in herself to become the ‘Big Girl’ she desperately yearns to be.
ASTERISM contemplates the wonders and challenges of transnational, polycentric living. Moving between South Korea, Peru, and the United States, the poems in the collection find luminous homes at the interstices of bridges, flight layovers, languages, desires, imperfect memories, and mutable mouths. They blur the line between self and other: words are translated into connotations, self-portraits become co-inhabited identities with family, friends, foods, and cultural histories. As ASTERISM interrogates capitalist enactments of fixed and exclusive belonging, each line seeks to unfurl towards a strangeness and beauty of its own making.
VAGABOND CITY 