Theory of the Voice and Dream

Author: Liliana Ponce

Translator: Michael Martin Shea

Publisher: World Poetry Books (2025)

For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when “to write today is an emptiness," or when “mouth and voice cannot find each other.” Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, “I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.”