Anna Wood
Learning a Love for Spanish Language through Latin American Poetry
My collection is composed of modern and contemporary Latin American poetry primarily in the original Spanish with the inclusion of some bilingual editions and some works in translation. It has developed out of the love for poetry and learning Spanish that I discovered when I was first exposed to Latin American poetry. The works I’ve collected reflect my interest in both poetic experimentation and the concept of the poetry book as an art object.
-Anna Wood, fourth-year winner
Selections from the Collection
Photo by Alan Klehr, Churchhill + Klehr, Chicago.
An emotionally charged, experimental book-length work of poetry in bilingual form dealing with the theme of gender violence. Co-written by two poets, one whom currently is receiving asylum in the U.S. after fleeing Ciudad Juárez, the Mexico border city formerly notorious for gender violence.
Photo by Alan Klehr, Churchhill + Klehr, Chicago.
Photo by Alan Klehr, Churchhill + Klehr, Chicago.
In this slim book, Martha Mega mixes pop culture with Greek mythology to create poems for our time.
Photo by Alan Klehr, Churchhill + Klehr, Chicago.
Without any context, one might think this chapbook was written by an amateur--the binding is hand-glued, the pages aren’t perfectly copied or cut--but Yaxkin Melchy is in fact a highly regarded young Mexican poet. Melchy himself gifted this chapbook to me when I interviewed him for a creative project. The back page describes this book as "Written in Chilango-Mayan-Peruvian-Chilean Spanish, translated to Australian English, designed in Québec, and published in a U.S.-Mexico border city