The Red Song by Melisa Machado. Translated from the Spanish by Seth Michelson (Action Books, paperback)
Publication Date: May 15, 2018
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Latinx Studies. If Paul Celan's ghost sang from inside the pit of a cherry... if each slow stroke of a comb through cool, dark hair could be graphed into language, it might sing THE RED SONG. Melisa Machado's first collection in English is a subversive, prophetic incantation and a magical geography of the body. In short, pulselike refrains, first published as text messages, talismans of the body's fragility—collarbones, ear bones, mouths, tongues, waists—become so many zones of alchemical opening. In lucid, spacious translation by Seth Michelson, lapped by the ghosts of Celan and Marosa di Giorgio, THE RED SONG is at once ritual and meditation, confession and encryption, "abyss and sky," "vocal prayer" and vision.
