Between Fish Scales

Author: Leire Bilbao
Translator: Joana Urtasun
Publisher: World Poetry Books (2026)

In her English-language debut, Basque poet Leire Bilbao gives us a visceral view of motherhood, worklife, and plural desire in a maritime landscape, both hyper-real and eerily anthropomorphic.

Carrying the melodies of her early, bardic work as a bertsolari (singer of improvised Basque verse), and a lived knowledge of local fishing traditions, Bilbao weaves a net of unfamiliar language that trawls the depths of femininity. She can turn a mother into a mollusk, an eye into a buoy, and a newborn into a thief in the span of a moment. This selection from several of Bilbao’s books makes her work available for the first time to English-language readers, and marks Basque-UK poet Joana Urtasun’s first book as a translator.