*Ticket (£6) includes refreshments & 10% off the author's book. 20 capacity, seated & accessible. Some tickets are allocated as PWYC starting at £0.00: please select this option if you need to do so*

International poetry performances and Q&A, headlined by an unmissable opportunity to hear a major Cuban poet read new work in the UK.

Bristol Poetry Institute and EBB present a triple bill evening with launches of new books by poets Victor Rodríguez Nuñez (*despegue/departure*) and James Byrne (*The Overmind*), both published by Broken Sleep Books, and readings from translator and editor Katherine M. Hedeen. The performances will be followed by an informal discussion/Q&A on poetry and translation.

On *despegue/departure*:

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning despegue / departure is a book about poetry, place, and belonging. Its rich, challenging, and subversive sonnets reveal the complexities and possibilities of Cuban contemporary poetry to a new English-language audience. Rodríguez Núñez speaks to a global generation of exiles and those whose hearts remain forever elsewhere, those who have found another home. despegue / departure is an original, inventive and unflinching examination of what it means to leave, to be left behind, and of our ability to stay:

you can see clear to the bone
the poetics of underdevelopment
the quadrant oval

-- Víctor Rodríguez Nuñez, "La Moderna Poesía", trans. Katherine M. Hedeen

On *The Overmind*:

Traversing an axis of Liverpool-London, and following a car accident in New York, The Overmind is an attempt to metabolise experience whilst seeing the world through the skin of a jellyfish. In lyric poems and sequences, Byrne summons his Irish and English working-class ancestry, asking questions against injustice to those in power. These poems are written through grief, illness and silence, where the author’s love for his daughter during periods of separation is powerfully connected with his own father’s dementia. Mythogeographic, linguistically adept and restlessly explorative of social and personal space, The Overmind is Byrne’s seventh full collection of poems and his most powerful work to date.

In The Overmind, I think we do ‘enter the interlude’, a between-place full of spectral distortions, subconscious stirrings, subterranean mutterings. It’s a collection with a keen ear to the infrasound; it catches words half-heard, sees things slant through smoke or shadow. Byrne’s book is ghostly, in that it is populated by apparitions. It is also ghostly in that it enacts kind of portable haunting, a ‘poltergeist among [the] living ghosts’ of history, literature and contemporary culture. There’s a playfulness at work here, a restless, tricksy engagement with traditions of art and forms of language, that’s both spooky and disruptive. There are those who exist on the periphery, whose music is made in the undersong. I think that’s who this collection is for – the working-classes, the ghosts in the machine.
— Fran Lock

After reading The Overmind, you are immediately impressed by James Byrne’s steely, yet tensile intelligence, and by the cognitive concentration he exerts on each poem, as though using a kind of pressure-valve syntax, which in each compressed statement feels as if it could burst and let seep, at any moment, the hiss of any still unused imagination. By imparting unremitting torque direct to every word and image, the poetic voice creates an immense repellent to any linguistic slack. Reason enough it seems to read this collection, for amid Byrne’s subversion of the written word and the masterful way in which he keeps language in a state of (almost) aporetic equilibrium, the readers will realize, almost at once, that they are encountering one of the least ponderous minds in contemporary poetry, and one of its most Promethean voices.
— Paul Stubbs

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over seventy collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including the Loewe Foundation Prize in 2015. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. His work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published eight book-length translations, including “thaw/deshielos” (Arc, 2013), “from a red barn” (co im press, 2020) and “rebel matter. poems 2002-20212 (Shearsman, 2022).

James Byrne is a British poet, editor, and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections “Everything that is Broken Up Dances” (Tupelo Press, 2015), “White Coins” (Arc, 2015), and “Blood/Sugar” (Arc, 2009). He earned an MFA in poetry from New York University, where he was awarded a Stein Fellowship. Byrne was the poet in residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University in England. He is the international editor for Arc Publications and the editor of “The Wolf” magazine, which he cofounded in 2002.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of poetry and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region into English, including Jorge Enrique Adoum, Antonio Gamoneda, Fina García Marruz and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. She is the co-editor, with Welsh poet Zoë Skoulding, of the groundbreaking transatlantic translation anthology, “Poetry’s Geographies” (Shearsman, 2022).

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less