Image of Absence

About Jeannette L. Clariond

Jeannette L. Clariond (Chihuahua, Mexico, 1949) has won numerous awards, including the Premio Nacional de Poesía Efraín Huerta for Deserted Memory and the Premio Nacional de Poesía Gonzalo Rojas for Everything Before Nightfall. She has translated more than twenty books of poetry by American and European authors, as well as ten books by the Italian poet Alda Merini. She received a Conaculta Rockefeller Foundation grant for her translation of Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac, and worked with Harold Bloom, translating important poetic works from the U.S. and co-editing The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of Contemporary North American Poetry, which won the Latino Book Award’s Best Translation Prize in 2013.

About Curtis Bauer

Curtis Bauer is the author of two poetry collections: Fence Line, which won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, and The Real Cause for Your Absence. His translations include: Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias; From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz; and Baghdad and Other Poems, by Jorge Gimeno. His poems and translations have appeared in the Southern Review, The Literary Review, and The American Poetry Review. He is publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and Translations Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. He teaches Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, and Letterpress Printing at Texas Tech University.

Praise for Image of Absence

In Image of Absence, Jeannette L. Clariond—the laureate of Mexico’s soul—takes H.D.’s hand and dives head first into the self-same sea which gave us Trilogy, that sea of treacherous silence wherein God’s name lives. With the courage only a mystic dares, Clariond breathes this water into her lungs so she might utter body, its absence; history, her absence; love, her ever-was, speaking sound into silence until it all becomes air. Of course, only the intrepid Curtis Bauer would be the one ready to travel with Clariond into this deep. We needed this book revealed to English; in this time of overwhelming American fear, I needed my chance to share in this uncommon prayer.
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse, and translator of Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation

Reading Image of Absence, how little I know, how deeply at home I feel in Clariond’s intimate strangeness, like finding again a deep friend from another life. I am grateful she offers, in absence, an overnight home place, or a half-hour refuge, waiting for us who wait. I don’t know Spanish, so my gratitude for Curtis Bauer’s translation, and for the blessing of his Translator’s Introduction, is boundless.
—Jean Valentine, author of Shirt in Heaven and Break the Glass