You've Heard This One Before

Author: Karmelo C. Iribarren
Translator: John R. Sesgo
Publisher: World Poetry Books (2026)

Iribarren learned to write poetry while serving drinks and wandering the streets of his native San Sebastián. Influenced by the so-called “dirty realists” of the US (Carver, Bukowski, Fante), he forged his own extreme poetic minimalism. A humble, humorous, and razor-sharp flâneur, “subservient to no one / and never up for sale,” Iribarren weaves the “small incidents” of life into his “tiny epic” whose simple language conceals a consummate art. You’ve Heard This One Before, the first selected volume of Iribarren’s work in English translation, samples from thirteen of his fifteen published collections.