Wed, May 23, 2018
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM PDT
LOCATION
Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles
2401 West 6th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90057
Join us to presentacion of Book of Peony by the wonderful Poet Gaspar Orozco
About the Author
Gaspar Orozco was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1971. The most recent of his poetry collections are Memorial de la Peonía, and, with Brooklyn artist Jairus, Game of Mirrors, an interactive e-book with English and Chinese. He was a member of the punk rock band Revolución X in the 1990s and co-director of the 2011 documentary lm Subterraneans: Mexican Nortña Music in New York. A career diplomat, he currently serves as Deputy Consul General of Mexico in San Diego.
Mark Weiss is an author, editor, and translator. He edited and was principle translator of two bilingual anthologies, ACROSS THE LINE / AL OTRO LADO: THE POETRY OF BAJA CALIFORNIA (Junction Press, 2002) and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry. Among his translations are Gaspar Orozco's BOOK OF THE PEONY (Shearsman Books, 2017), AUTOCINEMA (Chax Press, 2016), STET: SELECTED POEMS OF JOSÉ KOZER (Junction Press, 2006), Gaspar Orozco's Notas del país de Z, and Virgilio Piñera's La isla en peso / The Whole Island.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Mark Weiss. "Gaspar Orozco's extraordinary BOOK OF THE PEONY blew me away by a storm of quiet flame and blackness and nothing everythingness. I am writing this from Pont-Aven, where I have come to write about colonies and gatherings of artists, before regaining (what an inapproprié word,) and suddenly this poetry hits me in the Breton chill with—I can't say what—a dark blaze when I expected I have no idea what? I had been thinking ah, peony, like pensée, like a beloved and delicate pansy of thought, but this peony is nearer the chrysanthemum of Japanese writing from long ago. This remarkable poetry brings the long ago into nowness, if I can put it like that. It lights from far and also near, burning." —Mary Ann Caws