M. Buna Introduces Miyó Vestrini

Kenning Editions is publishing an edition of  Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini's poetry this year. It's the first time that her writing has appeared in English and it's been translated by poets Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig. Or, as M. Buna explains at Hyperallergic: "Even in her most cheerful moments, the Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini never stopped taking death seriously — or thinking about it. Translated by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig and edited by Faride Mereb, Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini is the first full-length collection of Vestrini’s texts available in English." Picking up from there: 

It spans three decades of her work, from the 1960s through the 1990s, and includes previously unpublished texts from the posthumous collection Es una buena máquina (It’s a Good Machine, Letra Muerta). The French-born Vestrini emigrated to Venezuela at the age of nine. At 18, she joined the Venezuelan avant-garde group Apocalipsis (Apocalypse). She later became a member of several Venezuela-based experimental literary groups such as 40 Grados Bajo la Sombra (40 degrees in the Shade), El Techo de La Ballena (The Ceiling of the Whale), and La Republica del Este (The Republic of the East).

For Vestrini, the refusal to compromise or accept tyrannical notions of truth was as much a part of her process as her meditations on death. In her writings, death and poetry have their own dark choreography that doesn’t shy away from affirming the stark contradictions at its core — exercises in morbidity also result in the resurrection of a new will to live, in a counter-suicidal impulse, even if it’s only a temporary one. These are whimsical poems that reveal the most familiar domestic settings as designed for eternal sleep. In such spaces, joy and tenderness are to be resisted and death is to be welcomed and carried out as daily routine.

Read more at Hyperallergic.