The first American translation of this fine poetry collection by Marie Étienne, centered on the French experience in Indochina (Vietnam), first appearing in book form in the Lumière ouverte series of Scandéditions, Paris, 1993.  Translated by Anne Talvaz, illustrated by Sandra Monciardini.

Set against the background of the Japanese occupation of the French colony of Indochina in the early 1940s, this richly lyrical collection captures both its terrors and its marvels. We begin with a child’s perspective, which gradually broadens in documentary and historical scope. Marie Etienne has a perfect eye for sensual detail and a style marked by startling and unexpected choices, both semantic and graphic. All of this is masterfully captured in Anne Talvaz’s beautiful translation; she has achieved a seamless re-embodiment of a deeply moving testament.  (Cole Swensen)

Marie Etienne is one of the most accomplished and intriguing contemporary French poets, combining a keen narrative sense, indeed a compulsion, with ludic formal experimentation. Anne Talvaz, herself an admired French poet with related preoccupations, has masterfully translated this multivocal sequence focused on wartime Indochina.   (Marilyn Hacker)

The first comprehensive collection of poems by Argentinian Luis Benitez to be translated into English shows clearly why he enjoys an international audience. Ravenna has selected published and unpublished work with an eye toward emphasizing the poet’s world view and, via the close attentions of Ravenna Associate Editor Cooper Renner to the work of prior translators, presenting an even voice throughout. (Cover drawing by Cooper Renner.)

Three modern, edgy and superb stories by famous Mexican author Mario Bellatin—Chinese Checkers, Hero Dogs and My Skin Luminous—translated by Cooper Renner. This, his first book to appear in English, promises us an fascinating, unsettling and important new voice in modern writing. In these stories the narrator speaks rationally, cleanly, carefully, with a sense of precision and progression. But the life he describes is not rational, clean precise or progressive. His focus seems to be on exploring the ins and outs of specific situations. He is not plot-driven, nor do his characterizations seem to function in the normal way—that is, to create a sympathetic character whom the author leads through some sort of growth process to a sort of epiphany. Any given one of his sentences, isolated from its context, might seem like an ordinary narrative sentence in a traditional work. Bellatin’s contexts don’t work that way: situations and thought repeat and recur in an apparently random fashion; he refuses to orchestrate climaxes and artificial excitements, even where a conventional writer would immediately do so.

This edition is now out of print.