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 Ravenna has selected published and unpublished work with an eye toward emphasizing the poet’s world view and, via the close attentions of Ravenna Associate Editor Cooper Renner to the work of prior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.

In an expansive follow-up to his earlier Ravenna title, The Moodier Could of Being, Cole takes us into the interior fluids of language and shows us our community and our solitude. “It is a rarefied intellect at play here, something perhaps that Borges might have imagined if he had combined his languages rather than keeping them separate. The emphasis on the music of words might suggest Dada, but Cole’s musical words demand that one grope through them, into their depths, to puzzle out their “sense” (from the Introduction to Frases To Or.)

Although Fox wrote this book during a year in Michigan, he brings in all the richness of his life lived growing up in Chicago with all of its rich cultural ambience, his first trip to Europe in his early twenties, his marrying a Peruvian poet and starting yearly trips to visit family in Peru, his two years teaching in Caracas, his visiting all the pre-Columbian ruins in the Andes, his year teaching in Mexico, two years in Brazil, his year studying Latin American Literature at the U. of Buenos Aires, his year in the Chilean Andes doing archaeological investigations (five published works on archaeology), his year in Spain….very strange, exotic, enriching, all based on the progress and changes of the year, but in a total worldwide context filled with historical references to world cultures and literatures. Really nothing else quite like it ever written. Real life, real time in universal cultural ambiences.

During the time of a falling city, I came to the Yucatan and spoke to my Mayan friends, and, through the Mayan language and contact with their lush world, I came to inhabit a different place. During a time of fission, I experienced fusion—the coming together of various forces. This book of poetry recaptures that journey and presents a critique, deconstructing the three major themes that are suggested by the reordered name of a fallen building: TRADE WORLD CENTER.

from the Foreword