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by Roberto Juarroz (Author), Wally Swist (Translator), Kurt Lovelace (Foreword by)
Step into a book that keeps asking the question most poetry never dares to touch: what if the "bottom of things" isn't where we think it is? These selections from Roberto Juarroz's lifelong masterpiece, Vertical Poetry, are a fierce, lucid meditation on consciousness, existence, and the flimsy borders we draw around reality. Here, life and death, presence and absence, self and world are not opposites but mirrors; the poems ask what lies beyond these tidy dualities, and what happens when they collapse.
Juarroz's lines stage strange, unforgettable moments: hands that build the man they belong to, thoughts that leak into the world like rain, language that dissolves into a silence more eloquent than any word. Again and again, he goes searching for the "untranslatable song," the reverse side of light and sound where meaning hides in what's missing. This collection invites the reader toward an impossible meeting point, where the gaze of the living crosses that of the dead, where the possible and the impossible briefly recognize each other. In that new, unclaimed space beyond time, Vertical Poetry doesn't just describe reality; it quietly, radically rewrites it.
