https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/translation daily 0.75 2026-06-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/8900c1ff-bf08-474c-b33d-659b4af9c70b/Ponce+-+Theory+of+the+Voice+and+Dream+-+Cover+-+PEN.png Translation - Theory of the Voice and Dream Liliana Ponce - World Poetry Books, 2025 **Winner of the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation** Among the five powerful finalists for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the strong verse of Argentine poet Liliana Ponce’s Theory of the Voice and Dream stood out. […] Shea’s translation deftly captures the essence of Ponce’s serial poems on creation and absence, offering them with an apt, skillful contradiction that melds appropriate ambiguity and admirable precision. —Judges’ Citation, 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation This essential selection of poems by Liliana Ponce is a spiral to step into—a dazzling space of oblique light, distorted distances, wobbly time. Ponce fearlessly stares into the void, where the fragility of existence and the inevitability of transformation are to be mourned and embraced. Shea’s deft, receptive translations join Ponce in rejecting the trap of certainties, of fixities. This is a poetics of the beginning—not as an origin, but as an endless thrust of becoming and undoing; a state of turbulence, dread, and ecstasy, where identity dissolves and reassembles in unknowable ways. Here, we partake in the ‘anarchic joy’ of writing, the pleasure of language as its own revolution. —Michelle Gil-Montero Liliana Ponce reaches for the most elemental things, the ones you can see only under blurry light. Her serial poems are vehicles for traveling toward a more enigmatic dimension of reality. ‘Things happen in other ways / Las cosas suceden de otro modo,’ Ponce affirms. Translator Michael Martin Shea exercises great precision, holding himself to her poetic demand for total honesty. Together Ponce and Shea offer a ‘thinking blue / azul pensante,’ turning each poem from day to its nightly unfolding. —Kristin Dykstra Writing from ‘the ghostly passage,’ the negative core, Liliana Ponce weaves language into states of sublime condensation, where time churns and dissolves and language remains on the brink of collapse and rebirth. In this luminous translation from Michael Martin Shea, I feel pulled into the endless shaping of sensation, and I look forward to returning again and again. —Alexis Almeida https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/39e28284-2a00-461c-9307-7f257d204ee1/Fudekara+cover.jpeg Translation - Fudekara Liliana Ponce - Cardboard House Press, 2022 The work's evanescence, its ‘not being,' the composition of the void, of the space between the lines, is the art, the mastery of Liliana Ponce in Fudekara, to make present what is felt, the other reality within ‘reality,’ released by and through the brush. Her admirable reticence is a bolt of world-opening lightning. —Cecilia Vicuña In Liliana Ponce’s dekatesseral Fudekara, nimbly translated by Michael Martin Shea, all thought emits a cosmic gesture and the writing hand traces an inviting, inkwet path to the negative sublime. —Joyelle McSweeney Named as one of the Actions Books “Favorite Books of Poetry in Translation” for 2022. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/1619664361280-5FLFA13LLS167NEUNQ01/Diary.jpeg Translation - Diario / Diary Liliana Ponce - Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018 Someone situates herself in a forest and lets it erase her own limits (of skin, ideas, references), lets that subjectivity grow in the slightest diary. A diary with no aspirations but to let nature, the one that erases the edges of the self, find its partner, its symmetry, in words. By doing that, she both constructs an aesthetic and questions it. She affirms a certain writing and she inquires of it, while the forest, its drowsiness, advances in her, in Liliana Ponce. As if an analogous creature had developed over the summer, as if it were the one writing this diary. —Valerie Mejer Complacency before a poetics based on analogy, not biography, where the time and space of finitude are symbolized by a torrid summer, its atmospheres sifting bodies and the anarchic act of writing this Diary that diverts the imaginary towards the "to develop the sensibility of air." An amazing diary of sensations, not of a biome. From this rare torpor, Michael Martin Shea’s translation emerges. —Lila Zemborain https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/poetry daily 0.75 2026-06-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/5ad3135d-87ff-42bf-be96-eb7674a2271a/The+Immanent+Fields+Cover.png Poetry - The Immanent Fields New Mundo Press, 2026 Shea’s is a poetics of velocity—I almost said viscosity and that’s true too. Verb-y and affect-full, the sentence is mad with action (“Green fruits go nuts”; “The bedpan crumbles”; “Piety unspools across the prairies”) and the line swerves hard (“whose roads are these, unpaved, / and so desirous of it—/ balls of prophecy in the nutsack of the real?”). But there is thickness too, an oozy sort of dolor emanating from bodies and objects in a steady state of arousal. The languor of immanence, the lust of simultaneity, thereby the libidinous anti-epiphanic. I am invigorated! —Aditi Machado These are poems transmitted from the final phase of lyric consciousness: a voice still singing as it’s dissolved by spectacle, capital, data, desire. Driven by terse, caustic declaratives and a flurry of similes mocking their own existences, Shea’s language machine distributes the body through black-flowered derangements and high-flown philosophical abjections. This feels like an accelerationist poetics, a deeply-textured anti-poetry, an act of psychic vandalism in the moment before we are all unceremoniously subsumed into the borg or the oceans vaporize. A delightful string of literary miscreants came to mind as I read this: Bill Knott, Alan Dugan, William S. Burroughs, Nicanor Parra, and Diogenes, for Lord’s sake. This book sets its teeth into the conceptual absurdities of our glowingly venal drive-thru empire. I would say it doesn’t let go, that it shakes the truth out, or that it transmits its rabidity to the larger social corpus, but this book would mock such predictable rhetorical moves. —Tim Earley “I do not think the simile is a sufficiently erotic experience,” declares the unstably ironic, shifty, and utterly intense “I,” of this book, early on. This is in a piece called “OPENING ARGUMENTS,” a good title, because this book theorizes what it does, does as a form of theorizing, theorizes, perhaps, as a form of handling a feeling (of bleak amusement? Burnt affection? Lively anguish?) toward the world. What it is theorizing is also at least partly the problem of mediation: “it is impossible to perceive a single image of the object[…]corresponding directly to the object itself” — and despite its ‘erotic insufficiency,’ the simile’s mediating invitation to see one thing through and as another is completely everywhere in The Immanent Fields: a true form of the book’s lively imbrication with and care for the damaged world it attends to. Desire flows “like” municipal waste, the signifier slips “like” a salmon, hope inflates “like” a carcass, vinyl siding flexes “like” belief, a deranged thought pierces “like” the spirit does. The mood is: pharmaceutical. The ideal geometry is of the dishwasher. Heaven is: of polymers. The anchoress has indeed been “forgotten in the walls,” but she’s in there. —Kai Ihns I put my ear up to this rhombus the way I do with the conch. I hear the echo of the quadrilateral; I know the small circulating air is not the ocean. In my mind, the echo of air in the shell provides some momentary comfort. A clean wistfulness. I am similarly arrested within the tessellations of this book’s sticky blab. I, too, want to watch a president die on live TV. I find myself anxiously luxuriating in the spermatozoic seance of Shea’s arrhythmic sequences, wiping the spectral emission from my chest before it dries and the tortures of the day begin, perchance also watching it drip from a hole, an approximate void, our only sense of comfort. "And elevates a phrase not operatic." —Ryan Skrabalak https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/b95860c9-2ec3-463c-ace7-210df94aa932/I%27m+Sorry+Cover.png Poetry - I’m Sorry But None of This Is My Fault Essay Press, 2025 In the age of Babel where language suffers from misuse, our muse is misuse. Michael Martin Shea’s poems ‘survey dereliction.’ They offer us a stream of the quotidian, the grotesque; an echo chamber of our toxic culture, relentless as existence. Okay fine,’ he says to the horror. But still the poet chases that ‘lunar ache. —Sara Nicholson In Adorno’s modernism, the ‘totality of the social’ slips into the art-object, and steadies itself there, protected from discursive reductions. But what if the ‘art-object’s’ (in this case, the poem’s) innards start talking back to its confines, without fear or remorse? I’m sorry but none of this is my fault, the title of Michael Martin Shea’s new book, could not be more apt. With a fencing foil quickness, Shea brilliantly lacerates the boundaries of ideologically vetted poetics by stretching metonymic meaning just shy of the breaking point. The surprising social-psychological entanglements that are revealed make for some of hardest won hilarity of any poetry around. —Rodrigo Toscano I’m not sure what these are. At times confession, at times accusation, at times grieving declaration informed by the moral and political ecologies of spectacle, they are also just incomprehensibly weird. And ingenious. And uplifting. —Gabriel Gudding https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/7ca94baa-8325-4099-bcb1-8ad2e9a6f5a3/shea+cover+orange.jpg Poetry - To Hell With Good Intentions Beautiful Days Press, 2024 If William Carlos Williams swallowed a Xanax and three tabs of acid, if he attempted to take a long nap, and if his brain was wired to a contraption that transcribed his bad dreams into poems, they might look a bit like Michael Martin Shea’s placid, euphoric, and horrifying vision of the lyric. In To Hell With Good Intentions, things don’t merely contain ideas; rather, they vibrate like prophetic objects in a televised crime scene, overflowing with the alternate grief and joy of our excessive present—a world filled with burning Amazon vans, airborne Doritos bags, and a humanity that is both knowable and not: “new toes which grew inside you / teeth new mouth new endless revision.” I am in love with Michael Martin Shea’s “beautiful brain” and these violent, gorgeous little poems that crawled like neon worms from its folds. —Marty Cain https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/1619717536925-9VVD6IPD1P5CDYTG9W2C/IMG_20181003_121537.jpg Poetry https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/1619717456032-YKSE10VCL60EKVV79Q44/shea5.png Poetry https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/1619717476353-NBA9ZQX2ZHGKKM975AQJ/soon.jpeg Poetry https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/bax daily 0.75 2022-03-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/398a5492-c8ce-40fd-bd00-5def77c8d46c/bax+2020.jpeg BAX https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/d42b4a5a-f88c-4182-abac-90259d7d990d/bax+2018.jpeg BAX https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/f9408802-7277-493a-b046-fa4009cd5acf/bax+2016.jpeg BAX https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/83c6d947-7f85-4f31-b424-65f98d421eae/bax+2015.jpeg BAX https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/about daily 1.0 2026-06-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/7b50f639-0271-49a3-8874-1f1dab6c6717/Shea2.jpg About https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/home daily 0.75 2021-04-29 https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/research daily 0.75 2026-05-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/6800641f-6ae8-47f7-9484-1ed7487dfffb/Brathwaite.jpg Research - I’m a scholar of hemispheric American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. My primary interests include poetry and poetics, transnational cultural practices, economic history, and literary translation. https://www.michaelmartinshea.com/teaching daily 0.75 2026-06-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1618497259178-6XJGK9GR6YAVBQL5L519/20140301_Trade-151_012-2.jpg Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1607694583486-2PQT0LQ193RL7MCB6DX4/20140228_Trade+151_0046.jpg Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec321c2af33de48734cc929/1607694644871-IC85FNH781UNZSZEGHDR/Aro+Ha_0428.jpg Teaching https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6089ecb7d5087f40f9bffb04/29f5d823-f796-40f9-b6f1-21169272c1d7/Teaching+Image.png Teaching - In my teaching, I help students think critically about cultural forms I routinely lead classes in American poetry, lyric theory, Latin American/Latinx and world literature, literary theory, and the practice of literary translation.