Liberamerica

Author: Monchoachi

Translator: Patricia Hartland

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2020)

The first translation of Martinican poet Monchoachi’s work into English, Liberamerica presents a world full of ancestors and other creatures, a liminal space between languages, life and death, male and female, land and water, body and spirit. A territory of rituals and relations brought into being within the dynamic linguistic multiverse for which Monchoachi is best known. Liberamerica—an excerpt from part one of Monchoachi’s two-volume collection, Lémistè (Partition noire et bleue) [‘Mistry (Black and Blue Partition)]—is an archipelago of throats powering a flood of voices, sonically saturating and bursting through limitations of standard language.

Liberamerica is #14 in the Señal series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.