Between Fish Scales

Leire Bilbao (trans. Joana Urtasun)

In her English-language debut, Basque poet Leire Bilbao gives us a visceral view of motherhood, worklife, and plural desire in a maritime landscape, both hyper-real and eerily anthropomorphic. Carrying the melodies of her early, bardic work as a bertsolari (singer of improvised Basque verse), and a lived knowledge of local fishing traditions, Bilbao weaves a net of unfamiliar language that trawls the depths of femininity. She can turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment. This selection from several of Bilbao’s books, with an afterword by Basque scholar Leire Erviti, makes her work available for the first time to English-language readers, and marks Basque-UK poet Joana Urtasun’s first book as a translator.

'Leire Bilbao’s poems prick me from the page, as if spearing an unknown organ. They set the bodies we are—and those we come from—inside a shifting, watery landscape, an amniotic sea. Surreal, elemental images gather in their nets, returning us “to the mother, the home, the tongue that made us.” These poems trawl daily life for moments of desire, violence, and creation, arranging and transforming them into small, intimate worlds of magic and terror. Joana Urtasun’s luminous translation from the Basque feels like a duet, a conversation, a homecoming.' – Emily Skillings