Join us on Friday, October 4, at 6 pm BST for Pamenar Press’s Voices of Change: A Feminist Collective Book Launch, featuring The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra.
Our editor Carolina Gómez-Montoya reads from her recent anthology, and joins in a collective celebration of recent books by Pamenar Press, with authors Leslie Kaplan, Rachel Levitsky, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi.
Our inaugural anthology—The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra—features ten poet-translators and one artist-illustrator. English-language poets, and poets who write from a language other than English, are paired according to the synergies of their creative and translation practice. Through original poetry, mutual translation, and collaborative essays on the topic of translation itself, The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra reflects deeply creative friendships that situate translation as equitable, intimate, and ongoing.
As with every Stenen Press publication, the book’s visual dimension has a pivotal role. In this collection, artist Kit Warren’s resplendent images embrace and challenge the work of the texts. Her vision submerges us in a dazzlingly complex cryptography: patterns of lines and dots (often recalling written notation systems) that suggest vibrant cosmologies of dissolution and reformation. In its entirety, Warren’s visual world of the anthology is a sweeping project of engagement and exploration.
Through an astonishing structure of reciprocal poetic and visual exchanges, editors Kythe Maryam Heller and Carolina Gómez-Montoya position English not as a site of perpetual return, but rather one point in a constellation of language(s), the space of the page, and visual gesture. The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra offers a life-affirming language of its own.
Contributions by Cecilia Vicuña, Rosa Alcalá, Etel Adnan, Sarah Riggs, Ananda Devi, Kazim Ali, Polina Barskova, Valzhyna Mort, Yu Xiuhua, Amanda Lee Koe, and Kit Warren. Edited by Kythe Maryam Heller and Carolina Gómez-Montoya.
Pamenar Press is an independent publisher producing books of poetry, hybrid and critical writing forms which are cross-cultural and multilingual.