A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada DiŽguez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.
Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as AndrŽs Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise DuprŽ, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English a
Praise for Secession/Insecession:
Secession/Insecession is as rich a feast as can be imagined. It's not just a further introduction to the writing of a major European writer, but a collaborative act of the anti-insular imagination by two of the finest poets writing today.
- Douglas Barbour
[Secession/Insecession] speaks to the obligation we have as writers, as readers, to share the words of those who inspire, and teach us, and transmit fire.
- Canadian Poetries
Chus Pato's Secession was chosen 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).