Theory of the Voice and Dream

Liliana Ponce

Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self. For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when to write today is an emptiness, or when mouth and voice cannot find each other. Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.

'A bolt of world-opening lightning.' – Cecilia Vicuña

'All thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime.' – Joyelle McSweeney

'Liliana Ponce reaches for the most elemental things, the ones you can see only under blurry light. Her serial poems are vehicles for traveling toward a more enigmatic dimension of reality. Translator Michael Martin Shea exercises great precision, holding himself to her poetic demand for total honesty. Together Ponce and Shea offer a “thinking blue,” turning each poem from day to its nightly unfolding.' – Kristin Dykstra