Cowboy & Other Poems

Author: Alejandro Albarrán Polanco 

Translator: Rachel Galvin

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)

Inventive, visceral, intricately musical, Cowboy & Other Poems showcases Alejandro Albarrán Polanco’s poetic and political vision, his lyrical and sonic intensity, and his fusion of political and personal inquiry. This selection draws from three recent collections, including Some People Are Not Horses (Algunas personas no son caballos), which was awarded the prestigious Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña in 2018. In Rachel Galvin’s translation, the sound play and intensity of Albarrán’s vision of contemporary life and its disparate forms of violence come to life.

"A raucous outburst that opposes a poetry of silence—an aseptic, apolitical, ‘pure’ poetry—with the noise of the world, the sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion."

–Luis Felipe Fabre

"Prosthesis poems raising questions about the means by which the discourse of terror erodes our conversations. Piles of poems bursting into piles of words, crashing against the univocal: Albarrán’s work is an ensemble of voices resonating from the most sincere tenderness to the most terrible and terrifying ways in which the contemporary world of crime and horror is narrated. In this book a cowboy gallops on a thousand prairies of senseless sense, carrying us mounted on the rump, expectant."

–Maricela Guerrero