Dreyfus, Mariela: Music Notebook

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2023

Publisher Marketing: "In writing as tough as it is visionary, Mariela Dreyfus scores the 'landscape / both real and dreamed' and summons a haunting lyric choreography, in conversation with everyone from César Vallejo and Carlos Oquendo de Amat to Mallarmé, Pina Bausch, and the Afro-Peruvian drum. This notebook contains notes from many undergrounds (Lima, New York, the self), developing processually into an expansive poetics of pain, thirst, flight, the mother's womb, the girl's rebellion, the lover's body, the burning city. Translator Gabriel Amor honors the pulsing rhythms of the poet's aural daydream without sacrificing the elegance of her knotty syntax, its 'prenatal impulse' in search of 'the memory of a harmony that / predates us.' MUSIC NOTEBOOK is a major work by an essential poet of our Latin American New York."--Urayoán Noel

"Mariela Dreyfus's music is elegiac and arresting; this volume carries us across the oceanic rhythm of this important volume of her sensual work. Dreyfus is one of the most significant Peruvian poets of this century. I'm thrilled to see the melancholy of grief enacted in 'the beauty of gestures' in this important and necessary work."--Carmen Giménez

"Death and Eros haunt this book as dramatically as they haunt our lives. MUSIC NOTEBOOK begins with the unpunctuated description of the birth of a corpse and, with a quick nod toward Cesar Vallejo, Dreyfus' compatriot Peruvian poet, a prayer for some redemptive word. In the endeavor 'to recall your melody,' the poet flees 'from the unnamable' toward 'that musical / language interweaving' bodies, 'the joy / of your rhythmic polyrhythms,' an intimacy that comes into being only when we 'synchronize our beats.' Although Mariela Dreyfus writes powerful, restlessly churning poems concerned with childhood, familial strife, and mother-care, her most searing poems are intensely erotic. Their signal physicality grants us, in Gabriel Amor's devoted translation, a kind of instinctual, primordial wisdom that has durance as it welds body and word."--Forrest Gander