Street by Street
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Pablo Jofre's Street by Street (Entre tanta calle), translated from the Spanish by Shook, includes 5 different poetry collections written between 2006 and 2020: Abecedary, You, Alien Status, Dead Skin and Berlin Manila.
Beginning with an abecedary inspired by Flaubert's 1911 Dictionary of Received Ideas and traversing across a fragmentary travelogue recounting the poet's overland journey from Berlin to Bangkok, the books collected in Street by Street, representing Pablo Jofré's poetic work from 2006 to 2020, chronicle the lived experience of the poetic nomad, heir to the grand tradition of Chile's diaspora writers, from Mistral to Wilms Montt. Praised by Will Alexander, who writes that his "condensed verbal scale" seems to have "sprung whole cloth from un-corrupted verbal ether," in these poems Jofré relishes his sexuality, explores the confines of gender, and embraces his status as a literal alien with alternating melancholy and amusement. Translated by Shook, whose own work Jofré has translated into Spanish, these poems take on a new life in English, "euphoric from so much karaoke." Jofré's lyric rises like "sugared vocables" to the reader's ear and leaves you desperate for a nibble.
Pablo Jofré
Pablo Jofré (born 1974) is a Chilean poet currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Jofré was awarded the Lagar Prize by the Chilean National Contest of Literature Gabriela Mistral (La Serena) for the poetry collection Abecedario in 2009. Pablo Jofré is the author of the collections of poems Abecedario (Salc 2009, Siníndice 2012, Cuarto Propio 2016), Lagar Prize for Poetry and Essay Gabriela Mistral 2009; You (Milena Berlin 2013); Immigration (Cuarto Propio 2017) which includes the poem THE DANCE OF EXISTENCE, 2010 poetry prize from the City of Sant Andreu de la Barca; and Berlin Manila ( LUPI / Zoográfico 2019), 2016 literary creation scholarship from the Book Fund (Chile); all included in Entre tanta calle (Amargord 2020).He participated in the international literature festivals Crossroads in New York (2014), LEA in Athens (2015), George Town in Malaysia (2016/2017), Genoa, the LIFEs biennial in Jakarta (2017), Enclave de Ciudad of Mexico, the Berlin Poesiefestival, the Cologne European Festival (2020) and the Kerouac CDMX Festival (2022).He has been an editor for the newspapers El País, La Vanguardia and Abc, and has translated the poetry of Bernice Chauly, Nora Gomringer, Elfriede Jelinek, Adrian Kasnitz, Odile Kennel, Eva Maria Leuenberger, Karla Reimert and David Shook into Spanish .His texts have been set to music, filmed and edited in Greek, English (Insert Press), Italian, German (parsitenpresse), Portuguese (Medusa) and French (À côté de cela).
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