BAGHDAD AND OTHER POEMS

By Jorge Gimeno

Poets At Work, 2015

“Like an ‘owl/ that passes in front of the sun/ in the white of day/ and makes your hair stand on end,’ this book comes at you like a strange omen of, it turns out, good luck and death and love. How is that possible? In this book you cannot have one force without the other two. Jorge Gimeno’s poems bristle with surprise and alarm and amazing tenderness. His poem, ‘Boy,’ as translated by Curtis Bauer, is simply the best poem I’ve read in a decade. A child discovers his imagination and its power is a danger and a comfort. Gimeno’s Baghdad is such a thing. In this book we know that ‘easily everything/ could not exist’ and yet it does, right in front of us: fragile, beloved and lost. What a beautifully haunting collection.”
—Steve Scafidi, author of The Cabinetmaker's Window

“In these gorgeous and often wild poems, reality and imagination jostle for space. Churches, mosques, and vaginas share the page. Jorge Gimeno is a one-of-a-kind voice who excels at juxtaposing ideas to make us rethink our world, and in translator Curtis Bauer’s hands, these become magical poems in English.”
—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

“Jorge Gimeno’s poetry is made of garlic and gazpacho, tobacco and asbestos, gin and blood. ‘I am like churches and mosques,’ says the speaker of these lean, glinting poems. ‘I don’t have friends.’ Tracing the arc of a life, the poems of Baghdad question the tenuous border between being and nonbeing. Curtis Bauer translates Gimeno into an American idiom that is effortless, elegant and full of empathy. They give us a bold book that ‘passes in front of the sun/in the white of day/and makes your hair stand on end.’”
—Yvette Siegert, translator of Alejandra Pizarnik’s A Musical Hell