Translated from the Spanish by Carlos Lara
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Flesh wounds, flies, flowers, and freedom. Blanca Varela’s MATERIAL EXERCISES is a declaration of divine oblivion vis-à-vis a violent mysticism. Here, no soul ascends to commune with a vengeful deity: salvation is not achieved from bodily punishment but found in the poetic possibility that emerges from the corporeal tension between tactility and spirituality, night and day, the cogito and the empirical, where language is both god’s first gift to humankind and the cadaver in which the sacred father decays with his mortal creation. Translated by Carlos Lara, Material Exercises is a display of the vatic exorcism of the unconscious and a phenomenological investigation of space and intersubjective incarnation.
Preorders for Material Exercises are now available at Small Press Distribution. A limited number of copies will be for sale from Black Sun Lit at the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle, WA, March 8–11, at table T1411.
Advance praise for Material Exercises:
“When I read Blanca Varela, I feel like she’s pinning my flesh to a table and coaxing a soul out of me. Material Exercises is an axe that cleaves meat from spirit, matter from memory, metaphysics from the world of things; yet it is also the gesture—celebratory and terrifying—of fusing them back together. Carlos Lara’s translation is pitch-perfect. Poet of a kindred violence, he just might be Varela’s perfect translator.”
—Kit Schluter, author of Pierrot’s Fingernails
“‘[H]oly gizzard / holy / flushed / redeemed latrine,’ Blanca Varela’s Material Exercises is finally here! Praise be to Carlos Lara for furiously kissing this book into English. In Varela, and now Lara, language is vital matter—resistant, resplendent, wild with thing-power, and as mirror-like as mercury running down the drain. Reader, get ready: the poem is not a passive structure to open and close—no, ‘the outside will never be inside.’ The poem is now a sensual lizard creature that ‘knows the joy of penetrating / itself / like night.’”
—Michelle Gil-Montero, translator of Berlin Interlude by María Negroni
Visit the Material Exercises page for additional product details, reviews, excerpts, and purchasing information.
Interested reviewers: Email editor [at] blacksunlit [dot] com for an advance review copy.