[10/27/26] Ferrari, Patricio: Mud Songs: Elsehere Book I

Fence Magazine, paperback

Publication Date: October 27, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Mud Songs Elsehere Book I was selected by Patricia Killelea for the 2026 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize.

Mud Songs Elsehere Book I, by polyglot poet, literary translator, and Fernando Pessoa scholar Patricio Ferrari, is a lyrical and archival journey through languages, inheritances, and crossings. This visionary collection by Ferrari reveals a multilingual poetics of arrival, attentive to histories of migration, loss, and renewal. Book I of the Elsehere multilingual trilogy celebrates the living body of language, teeming with its many voices carried across generations. Buenos Aires, a protagonist, speaks in tongues—from castellano ("last of the Italian dialects") and lunfardo ("argot porteño") to its "talismanic / barrios // filled with ventriloquist hands." A home of many places and an "immigrant" unto itself, the city preserves words and gestures once spoken in homes and experienced still on the streets, in tango lyrics, or in a mate gourd passed hand-to-hand. In one of the book's quiet ars poeticas, the neighborhood tailor remarks '"Como se camina se baila,'" you say / As one walks so one dances," which reverberates throughout Mud Songs—churning "fluencies of barro-mud" with an "anchor / mouth." Here, language becomes a meeting place of selves. May we remember, as Ferrari does, that we are "perpetually arriving." We are not only "the ocean's offspring," we can make "a harbor out of any tongue."