ISBN 9781733408240
In Luis Chaves’s Equestrian Monuments, the stately figure of a former president, Leon Cortés, is counterbalanced by a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a drag queen, a singleton, homunculus, thief, and gardener. Dialogue from The Exorcist coexists alongside lines from the Latin Kyrie, Rex, while sweeping statements about entire generations, continents, and genres find a basis in the most intimate details of home-life. The intersections are uncanny, sometimes hilarious, often sad and unsettling. Chaves’s hyper-caffeinated imagination renders each image in this remarkable collection in a way that orients the reader and provides a moment’s stasis and clarity before “the waves come and the waves erase it.”
Originally published by Editorial Germinal in 2011, Equestrian Monuments is Luis Chaves’s seventh book of poetry, and his first to be published in English, in a stunning translation by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim.
© Esteban Chinchilla
Luis Chaves (San José, 1969) is considered one of the most important contemporary authors in Costa Rica. He has written poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has published, among others, the poetry books Los animales que imaginamos (1997), Chan Marshall (2005) and the anthology La máquina de hacer niebla (2012) As well as 300 páginas (2010, essays), El Mundial 2010 - apuntes (2010, chronicles) and Salvapantallas (2015, novel). He has been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian and Slovenian. In 2011 the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart awarded him the Jean Jacques Rousseau fellowship and in 2012 he received the National Poetry Award (Costa Rica). In 2015 he was at the DAAD artist residency program in Berlin, and a resident for the Institut for Advanced Studies in Nantes in 2017. In 2020 his chronicle Vamos a tocar el agua was selected as Best Book of the Year by Rolling Stone Magazine (Argentina). He lives in Costa Rica.
To keep from dwelling on the imminent
let’s speculate about the fate
of a friend from elementary school
who always covered his notebooks in pink.
Or let’s be practical
and calculate our taxes.
“In Luis Chaves’s poems, the world becomes an ever-expanding list in a mind that keeps ticking off items, then circling back to check on them again. Yes, the mind says, that was there, that was then. The job is to pare the list down to the truly important, which, it turns out, are the small things that persist until, in the ordinary disorder of our lives, they take on the quality of myth: the fragment of a day, a monument in front of which we posed for a moment, a window in which we once glimpsed an ad. That’s how these brilliant poems work, as a generous invitation to come in and see ‘a slideshow of [the] mind’s own making.’ The haunting particulars stay long after you put down the book.”
—Mary Jo Bang, translator of Inferno and Purgatorio, author of The Last Two Seconds
“What a masterful translation. A true monument, co-created with great precision and care.”
—Edith Grossman
“I cherish this book. In Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim’s hands, Equestrian Monuments makes me think of poetry as a place where we find all the things we’ve stored and left behind some time ago—those things, invested with their own sense of meaning, like the dense fog of memory, when we pass them by. Carried into English with loving care and astute, capable and generous attention, these poems remind us of a world in constant traffic that serves itself of our anxieties and their furious enumerations, as well as the dream of a life lived in our own private rooms.”
—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
“In Equestrian Monuments, Luis Chaves constitutes a world of white stones in a garden, mixed laundry in a washing machine, clouds in unspecified formation, out-of-focus photographs—an everyday, unadorned world remade with hardly a moment’s notice, then remade again so quickly, its ephemerality appears to define it, to be the point. The gift of Chaves’s poems, for me, is in their testimony that our most urgent metaphysical questions exist alongside, if not inside of, the most quotidian ‘stuff’ of our lives. In this collection, translators Guez and Zighelboim brilliantly capture Chaves’s irreverence, his strange and capacious imagination, and his predilections of syntax and tone, with such an exquisite sensitivity and grace, their translations read as originals, even as we know their source. I am grateful to have this book.”
—Charif Shanahan
© Wesley Mann
Julia Guez is the author of In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (Four Way Books, 2019). Her poetry, prose and translations have appeared in Poetry, Guernica, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, PEN Poetry Series and the Brooklyn Rail. Four Way Books will be releasing her next collection of poems, The Certain Body, in 2022. Guez teaches creative writing at Rutgers. She also serves as the senior managing director of program design and implementation at Teach For America New York. Guez lives in Brooklyn and online at juliaguez.net.
© Alexis Baldwin
Samantha Zighelboim is the author of The Fat Sonnets (Argos Books, 2018). She is a 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Poetry, a recipient of a Face Out grant from CLMP, and the recipient of the 2016 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation from The Poetry Foundation. Her poems, translations and essays have appeared in POETRY, Boston Review, Lit Hub, The Guardian, PEN Poetry Series, Guernica, Stonecutter, Fanzine, and The Poetry Society of America, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design at The New School. She inhabits the internet at samanthazighelboim.com.