Street by Street

Author: Pablo Jofré

Translator: Shook

Publisher: Insert Press (2023)

Pablo Jofré's Street by Street (Entre tanta calle), translated from the Spanish by Shook, includes 5 different poetry collections written between 2006 and 2020: Abecedary, You, Alien Status, Dead Skin and Berlin Manila.

Beginning with an abecedary inspired by Flaubert's 1911 Dictionary of Received Ideas and traversing across a fragmentary travelogue recounting the poet's overland journey from Berlin to Bangkok, the books collected in Street by Street, representing Pablo Jofré's poetic work from 2006 to 2020, chronicle the lived experience of the poetic nomad, heir to the grand tradition of Chile's diaspora writers, from Mistral to Wilms Montt. Praised by Will Alexander, who writes that his "condensed verbal scale" seems to have "sprung whole cloth from un-corrupted verbal ether," in these poems Jofré relishes his sexuality, explores the confines of gender, and embraces his status as a literal alien with alternating melancholy and amusement. Translated by Shook, whose own work Jofré has translated into Spanish, these poems take on a new life in English, "euphoric from so much karaoke." Jofré's lyric rises like "sugared vocables" to the reader's ear and leaves you desperate for a nibble.