No Shelter

A Lannan Translation Selection

Beautifully translated by the award-winning American poet Forrest Gander, the work of highly esteemed Mexican poet Pura Lopez-Colome is, with this important volume, available in the US for the first time. Selected by Gander from throughout Lopez-Colome’s five books in Spanish, these exceptional poems confront the confinements of fate, history, and misbegotten beliefs.

In forms that blur back and forth between poetry and prose, Lopez-Colome uses spare and honest language to describe the music of dreams, faith, and faithlessness; hers are poems of the soul resuscitated from the shackles of the body. As Gander notes in his Introduction: [This] poetry is philosophical and exacting, pared into short, sharp lines, obsidian flakes. Indeed, the fierce intelligence and insistent moral and spiritual engagement of Lopez-Colome’s poetry situate her among the most significant contemporary Mexican poets. No Shelter is a bilingual edition, with English translations appearing in the first half of the text and the Spanish originals in the second.