Translation
Theory of the Voice and Dream
Liliana Ponce - World Poetry Books, 2025
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
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.
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
Additional Translations
“Three Poems.” Augusto Lunel. Poesía en Acción. 2023
“From Poema (#4).” Liliana Ponce. The Idaho Review. 2023.
“From Only The Eye Sees Blue (#4, #6).” Liliana Ponce. Poetry. 2022.
“From Beyond the Somber Station (#6, #9).” Liliana Ponce. Denver Quarterly. 2022.
“From Beyond the Somber Station (#2-5).” Liliana Ponce. Guernica. 2022.
“From Poema (#2).” Liliana Ponce. Witness. 2022.
“The Somber Station.” Liliana Ponce. New England Review. 2021.
“Eight poems from Fudekara.” Liliana Ponce. Asymptote. 2021.
“Four poems from Fudekara.” Liliana Ponce. Gulf Coast. 2019
“The Wild Ones / Las díscolas,” Maquina de Lavar. In It's in the Future: Five Contemporary Female Poets in Argentina, edited by Alexis Almeida. 2018.
“Where Vertigo Stirs: An Interview With Reynaldo Jiménez and Silvia Guerra.” Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. 2017.
Interviews and Press
Fudekara reviewed at ZYZZYVA and the Action Books Blog.
Diario/Diary featured at Words Without Borders and reviewed at PANK.
Reading “from Poema (#2) by Liliana Ponce,” Witness “Missed Connections” Virtual Release Party.
Interview with David Francis, New England Review’s “Behind the Byline” Series.