Micrograms

Micrograms will be published to coincide with a festival of translation in Seattle in November that Wave Books is organizing to kick off the release of our new translations. In place of a typical author tour, the translators plan to hold events and workshops around the country that will teach, talk about, and otherwise engage readers and writers in this work. Micrograms is very teachable, and we plan to promote and encourage course adoption through its various mediums of poetic history, omnibus and generative model. Translator Joshua Beckman will utilize his high visibility as a poet who reads and lectures frequently to read from and otherwise promote Micrograms. We expect features and excerpts in such literary journals as Jacket, The Drunken Boat, Rain Taxi, BOMBlog, The Believer, and Bookslut, among others. We will promote this title through social media like Facebook & twitter and on the author's and translators' pages on our website.

Deliberately anachronistic and delightfully extractable, the microgram is a metaphor itself for that which is well worth the digging.Along with Neruda, Vallejo, Paz, and Borges, Jorge Carrera Andrade is widely considered one of the most important poets of Spanish-American postmodernism. Harvard Review wrote of Andrade's poetry in translation, it is "a testament to Andrade's status as one of the most original and enduring voices in twentieth-century poetry." The co-translators have worked previously together on well-received projects. Joshua Beckman's translations are particularly well-known: his translation of Tomaz Salamun's Poker was a finalist for the PEN/America translation award. The unique format of Micrograms allows for multiple avenues of engagement: as literary history, anthology, and generative guide, this unique work appeals to a broad spectrum of readers. Micrograms will appeal to readers and practitioners of haiku; a form currently experiencing a rise in popularity, no doubt partly due to its accessibility.