Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga

The first book in the inaugural series Malinda A. Markham Memorial Translation Prize, Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems of Gemma Gorga brings together in one volume poems from six of this contemporary Catalan poet’s books, introduced, selected, and translated by the award-winning American poet and translator Sharon Dolin. In this bilingual edition, readers will become acquainted with the breadth of Gorga’s work in lineated verse, which spans more than twenty years. Readers of her book of prose poems, Book of Minutes, also translated by Dolin, will find all of Gorga’s preoccupations–with language, with metaphysics, with poetry’s dance between word and silence–expanded here in poems that are as limpid yet intricate as the work of Jane Hirshfield. Translated from Catalan, a European language that has a long history of fraught political implications for those who use it, this is a necessary book.