Selected Poems

A vibrant and compelling bilingual edition of poems by the acclaimed Mexican writer Jeanette Clariond, translated by Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander

Even Time Bleeds is a revelatory selection of the work of Jeannette Clariond, a major contemporary Mexican poet known for her sensuous lyricism and philosophical gravity. Translated and introduced by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Forrest Gander, this volume gathers poems from across Clariond’s career and presents the English translations and the original Spanish texts on facing pages. Whether writing about science or Romanticism, childhood or the Chihuahua Desert, ancient Mexican myths or the pandemic of Mexican femicides, Clariond displays a complex self-consciousness that captures much about contemporary identity in Mexico and beyond. Born in 1949 into a Lebanese family that emigrated to Mexico, Clariond has spent much of her life traveling between Mexico, the United States, and Spain, and she writes about varieties of exile and the fearsome complexity of the US–Mexican border with rare insight. Even rarer: she gives voice to her own interiority in a way that is accessible and piercing, as though her true country is inside of each reader.