Bridges

Bridges is a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events. The concrete presence of the bridges, with names such as Pueyrredón, La Noria, Avellaneda, among others, marks the limits of the capital city and the beginning of the periphery surrounding it, characterized by a vastly different landscape. In Genovese's historical memory, many scenes from her childhood and adolescence merge with the revolts and uprising of the Peronist working class and the repressive military dictatorship.

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Buenos Aires is sometimes said, with a shrug or a wistful sigh, to "turn its back" on its river: as if the city goes about its business without a palpable sense of communion with the water that defines it. Alicia Genovese's long poem Puentes, tenderly translated by Daniel Coudriet as Bridges, does the very opposite. In one evocative scene after another, Genovese crosses both literal and metaphorical bridges to explore the transformations in a landscape, a family, an era, and a self over time, uttering "nomenclatures / that refuse / the anonymity / of a non-place / and affirm / a unique space / with a skidding / of images passed by, / returned in perception." Coudriet's translation of this rich work flows along as whole and complex as the body of a river: gentle, formidable, sonorous, full of surprises.-Robin Myers

Alicia Genovese's poignant meditation on bridges understands them in all their complexity-sometimes as link, sometimes as obstacle, always as "both precarious and solid." Holding the sweet and the bitter gracefully suspended on either side, Genovese probes our imperfect impulse to connect and to keep moving, to find solutions that then turn into problems. "A bridge is a leap and an ellipsis," she tells us. Rarely has this in-between space been so movingly limned.-Donna Stonecipher