The Poetry Translation Centre – förlag

This remarkable collection is a selection from Adelaide Ivánova’s award-winning book the hammer (o martelo). This unsettling work considers both sexualised violence and consensual sex through a single narrative voice. It explores post-rape experience in a morally bankrupt justice system and offers potent expression of female sexuality – within and beyond the bounds of marriage – in poems that are challenging, profound, and darkly comic. Ivánova’s work is a form of impassioned resistance that delivers a necessary shock to the system. Includes an afterword by Emily Critchley.

"Ivánova sings of bodily fragmentations and argues that these ruptures are the only way of representing the whole body in an unjust system. The hammer, in poems that frame the pamphlet, is both judgment and weapon, is language and physics, is inevitable and not: a tool of interrogation and resistance."- Annie Fan, Modern Poetry in Translation

My Tenantless Body is the celebrated Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo’s first publication in English. It presents a sensitive yet forceful new voice that leads us through the haunted nightscapes of China with dark wit. The book’s young protagonist veers in and out of focus: her thoughts always intensely clear, her feeling never simply clarified. In these poems the oblique and the plain-spoken seem to cross paths, picking one another’s pockets along the way. Includes an afterword by Rebecca Tamás.

"One reads in Yu's pointed lines a disappearance of the poet herself; not only in her predominant idiom (a searching, imperative voice), but in her stark depiction of contemporary China's bleached cities and sullen interiors, with hardly any room left for the expressive first-person".- Theophilus Kwek, The Poetry Review

Karin Karakaşlı is an Armenian-Turkish poet and short story writer who has previously appeared in our 2014 anthology My Voice. She has been translated by Canan Marasligil, working with Sarah Howe, acclaimed poet and academic whose first collection Loop of Jade won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Salome Benidze is one of Georgia’s rising literary stars. In this selection of poems, she explores romantic love and all its corollaries: longing, regret, trauma, confession, revelation, even war. Her poems, plainly written but heavy with feeling, hold our gaze and address us directly. The luminous English translations in this bilingual chapbook have been prepared by leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters, working with acclaimed British poet Helen Mort (Division Street; No Map Could Show Them).

"Benidze’s girls and women seem fragile things that hang on threads of love, and crash when the threads are broken."- Adham Smart, Modern Poetry in Translation