Copy

About the Author\nDolores Dorantes is an Acharya in the Buddhist tradition, a journalist, writer, therapist, poet, performer, and sacred animal. She is a Mexican born in the mountains of Veracruz in 1973 but raised in Ciudad Juárez. Recent books translated into English are The River, a collaboration with the artist Zoe Leonard, and Style. Her socio-cultural writings and political-social reflections, along with the majority of her books, are part of the commons at www.doloresdorantes.blogspot.com. She believes in a United Latin America.\nRobin Myers is a translator and poet. Recent and forthcoming translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry and lives in Mexico City.\nFrom Mexican-born poet Dolores Dorantes, Copy is a book-length prose poem examining extrication, refuge, and reintegration, presented in English for the first time by award-winning translator Robin Meyers.\nThrough deconstructed dictionary entries and powerfully syncopated, recursive texts, Copy is a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person's disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration.\nThis displaced, dispossessed voice explores what it means to be extracted, subtracted, abstracted out of being—and returned into it. Meditative, urgent, and alive, Copy asserts itself as an invocation, both intensely personal and insistently communal, of the right to refuge, and it enacts a powerful homage to the human capacity for creation and metamorphosis. In this way, this book points to the wound of being extricated, serving as both a suture and a salve.\nExcerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.\nThis is I. This is he.\nThis is the miserable one, son of the miserable man and miserable woman. Son of your water and fire. I came from you, from nothingness, from one of your old poems, I came. I came from the imagination to return it to you and to carve your name, in stone like all the other parts of this wasteland. I asked a mule about its father and it said to me:\nMy uncle is a horse. Then it disappeared.\nI asked a girl about her father. She became shy and she said: Perhaps it is you, and then she slipped into the fog.\nI asked a lark that was whispering to its mother about its mother. It approached and said: Perhaps she is you, so please carry me. And it slept in my hand.\nI asked myself: Who am I?\nThe nocturnal echo around me responded: Who am I? This is I. This is he.
This is all of my imagination.