Overview
A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex, and death. This is the first translation of Spanish poet Manuel Vilas's two major collections, Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death, and sex, they go off into freewheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The poet James Womack has won prizes for his versions of Vilas's work, and of Mayakovsky's. Vilas is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map, across land and water, and between romances. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak, bluntly and with black humour, always alert for the fantastic.Author Biography
Manuel Vilas is a Spanish writer. He is the author of several books, including thirteen collections of poetry, seven books of essays, and six novels. James Womack currently lives in Madrid, where he works as a freelance translator from Russian and Spanish and is co-editor of the publishing house Nevsky Prospects.
