11

The title of this book evokes the "other" September 11: Chile's September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román's work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version into English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.

Contributors include Daniel Borzutzky, Alexis Almeida, Patrick Greaney, Daniel Beauregard, Robin Myers, J'ssica Pujol Duran, Whitney DeVos

Poetry. Hybrid. Latinx Studies. Translation.

Carlos Soto Román (Valparaíso, 1977) is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds an MA in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and curated the anthology of US poetry Elective Affinities. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks, and festivals in Chile, the United States, and Europe. In the United States, he has published Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press), Bluff (Commune Editions), and Common Sense (Make Now Press). In the United Kingdom, he has published Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press), and in Chile he has published La Marcha de los Quiltros, Haikú Minero, Cambio y Fuera, 11, Densidad (d=m/V), and Antuco, the latter in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra. He translated the first Spanish-language version of Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff. His work can be found in the American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Apiary, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Crux Desperationis, Mandorla, MAKE Magazine, Pennsound, Tiny Mag, Aufgabe, Jacket2, Asymptote, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, A Perfect Vacuum, Periodicities, Latin American Literature Today, and Pensamiento Político. His book 11 was awarded the 2018 Municipal Poetry Prize in Santiago, Chile.

Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse) and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti’s Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues) and co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Her poems, prose, translations, and interviews have recently appeared in FENCE, Oversound, BOMB, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and edits 18 Owls Press.

Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Action Books Blog, Propagule, ergot, Self Fuck, New South, Burning House Press, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He’s the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry, most recently Total Darkness Means No Notifications (Anstruther Press) and Anatomizing Uncanny Alley (Self Fuck). His full-length collection of poetry, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics and he recently released a splatterpunk novel Blood Pudding (World Castle Publishing) and a post-apocalyptic novella The Mother of Flowers (The Wild Rose Press). Daniel’s first collection of short stories, Funeralopolis (Orbis Tertius Press), and existential horror novel Lord of Chaos (Erratum Press) will be published in 2023. He is also co-founder of OOMPH!, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry and prose in translation. He can be reached @666ICECREAM.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures and cultures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec (Ugly Duckling) and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard (Ugly Duckling), as well as co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling) and Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común (Cardboard House). Involved in various collaborative editorial endeavors, most recently she co-edited Ruge el bosque: ecopoesía del cono sur (Caleta Olivia), the first volume in a series of multilingual ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. Currently a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.