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THE XUL READER: AN ANTHOLOGY OF ARGENTINE POETRY, 1980-1996

by Ernesto Livon Grosman, Ed.

In the beginning of the 1980's and during the dictatorship that started in Argentina in 1976 and ended in 1983--a small poetry magazine, XUL, published its first issue. Since then, and until the present, the magazine has called for a discussion of poetry and writing in which politics and formal experimentation were no longer conceived as mutually exclusive. We have now, for the first time, a bilingual anthology that presents us with the unmapped territory of Argentina's poetry of the last 16 years, a retrospective view as much as a way of knowing what to expect in the coming years.

"The XUL Anthology brings into English a collection of poems and essays from Argentina's most formally and socially investigative poets, a group largely unfamiliar to North American readers. This books open up a dialogue: it is to our great benefit to read it and respond."- Charles Bernstein

"Now I shall begin to sing": the opening line of Martín Fierro that establishes with eloquent precision the site and the gesture of the Argentine poet. It refers to the appropriateness of his territory and to his work as a singer. Vocation and place that, indeed, validates, since the vanguardism of the 20s, Oliverio Girondo and Xul Solar. And that by means of the emblem of this latest Xul, the poets of the 90's turn toward the XXI century. For all of this, the insignia of this anthology: 'Two hundred years not of solitude but of Argentine poetry.'"- David Viñas