[05/01/26] Reyes, Miriam: Sardine

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Translated by Laura Cesarco Eglin

Publication Date: May 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: Writing for the first time in Galician, Miriam Reyes crosses the oblique, multi-dimensional passages between her home country Galicia and Venezuela, to which she migrated at the age of eight. In Sardine, Reyes' frustrations using her maternal grandfather's native tongue become confrontations with the insufficiency of language itself, as a means to contain experience, meaning, and the self. Sardine lives in the ruptures in space and time forced open by migration and offers memory as a yoke for our discordant selves.

"In Sardine, Miriam Reyes has written a beautiful poem from a space beyond 'the fiction / the frustration / of the bilingual dictionary,' finding poetry in the complex and noisy space where languages—and poets—meet. The poem is shaped both by the 'difficulty' and the 'pleasure' of this noisy meeting place. This is a poem that hedges, hypothesizes, crosses out, footnotes, and relentlessly reworks its own language and logic. The difficulty is the pleasure in other words. Big thanks to Laura Cesarco Eglin for translating a superb, original, contemporary work of poetry with such cunning and skill.” —Johannes Göransson

"Miriam Reyes is a poet of the oceanic body and its afterlives, of gills and guts, of the possibilities of a migrant form keyed to the breath of longing and the pulse of memory. Sardine summons the erotic power of tautology, the slackness in every taut line, its abecedarian experiments and eccentric footnotes always returning to the animal urgency of song. Laura Cesarco Eglin’s bold yet judicious translation vividly captures Reyes’ sense of wonder, her propulsive wordplay and alliteration, and the restlessness of a poetic intellect that refuses to 'call things by their name.' Here, the 'tonguedarkforest' is sovereign as it makes its own meanings and unsettles the biopower of translation, revealing 'the fiction / the frustration / of the bilingual dictionary.'” —Urayoán Noel

"Miriam Reyes returns to the Galician language as lil sardine, fish out of water tossed onto the grill. Can a tongue left behind in emigration ever come alive in the mouth again? Reyes’s dexterity and slips upon entering Galician dip us all into the hazards of speech and the joy of reading. Any lover of language will delight in the tongue-tied tongue-wagging of these droll and captivating poems, brought marvelously into English by Laura Cesarco Eglin." —Erín Moure