Waterloo Press - Mori Ponsowy

Mori Ponsowy
Enemies Outside / Enemigos Afuera (Available October 2010)
Translated by Mori Ponsowy and Naomi Foyle

ISBN 978-1-906742-25-6
£10.00

Mori Ponsowy was born in 1967 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but grew up in Perú and Venezuela. Ponsowy initially studied Philosophy and then earned an MA in Political Sciences and an MFA in Creative Writing and Magazine Publishing. She has won several awards for her exceptional novels along with the Argentinean Julio Cortázar Award (Premio Julio Cortázar) for Best Cultural Magazine of the Year (2002) for lamujerdemivida, of which she was co-founder and editor. Ponsowy has translated two books by American poets: The Father by Sharon Olds (El padre, Bartleby, 2004) and What The Living Do by Marie Howe (Lo que hacen los vivos, Luna Nueva, 2004). Ponsowy is now back in Buenos Aires, where she works as a freelance editor and op-ed contributor for the national newspaper La Nación. For more information on Mori Ponsowy please visit: www.unagomadeborrar.blogspot.com
Naomi Foyle is the author of The World Cup and The Night Pavilion (PBS Recommendation), both from Waterloo Press. Her translations of Rilke have appeared in The Gown Literary Supplement (Belfast), while Eric Ormsby called her ’midnight versions’ of Anna Akhmatova ‘…the only versions I know which give that poet an authentic voice in English’.
Author photo Translator photo Mori Ponsowy Naomi Foyle
This compelling first collection has received two major prizes in Argentina: the Primer Premio Nacional Iniciación from the Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación and a Mención Honorífica from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Novelist, translator and poet Mori Ponsowy commands a rare discursive flexibility and a sharp, searching freshness of vision. Here the cross currents of physics, history and memory join in a clear, fast-flowing river, inevitably surging into the white water of loss and desire. And while Enemies Outside is charged with the unique atmosphere of her native landscape, the poet’s tender observations of childhood, animals, mental illness and romantic estrangement convey a compassionate sense of the other that transcends cultural and linguistic differences. Ponsowy’s wide-ranging references weave generosity and pain into vivid poems that question the nature of love, family, sanity, science, art and history… these poems search for cause and effect, for an explanation of both our quotidian and profound experience, from the origins of a son’s sleeping habits to the nature of DNA, and the mystic experience of Sufi meditation. This moving and original work questions the tragic and hopeful perceptions of the imagination. Stephanie Norgate Mori Ponsowy´s striking poetry simultaneously grazes the common ground of our mortality, and rises or sinks into the paradoxes of life as a moral act. In her poetry natural forces don’t abandon the sacred, and scientific proof doesn’t repudiate nostalgia. Here, narrative construction serves emotional clarity, decanted in a lilting syntax, full of intuitions and revelations beginning with the crucial fact that one life expresses every life: something only poetry can give account of. This is her author´s signature. Joaquín Marta Sosa With a sometimes dreadful beauty, Enemies Outside is a book which is absolutely alive. María Teresa Andruetto Restlessly and without concessions, Ponsowy exposes the fragility that defines us. There is no unnecessary ornamentation here: these poems are inhabited by the bleeding wound, the tremor of truth, the burning thread that connects our lives with the lives of our parents and of our sons: the legacy we transmit and the dream we embody. Carles Duarte i Montserrat Work published within the framework of ‘Sur’ Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic.