Monday, May 4, 2026

Jake Kennedy : Sonora, by Chus Pato : Translated by Erín Moure

Sonora, Chus Pato
Translated by Erín Moure
Veliz Books, 2026

 

Did you see her fly?
she ascends the steps of the labyrinth
right to the top
where the planks wobble
where empty cages lie in heaps
where the dust and heat are suffocating
or up to the cone of light shining from the garden
She lives in that house
and in that one
and in the apartment
and in the others 

with the wraiths. (13)

 

Please let me reside here a little longer in the productive and wild space called not-knowing knowing. And please let me stay here where it’s the body’s knowing that prevails because (because because) the sparked-up heart or the tingling gut or the keen tongue isn’t fussed at all about contradiction and paradox and ambiguity. One hopes a single poem can create such an effect and yet this whole book—this whole sonorous Sonora—acts as a portal to mysteries that cannot easily be said or shared without ourselves (reader-listeners) resorting to new logics of expression.

Sonora is tremendous Galician poet Chus Pato’s latest (12th !) book of poetry and it’s also the winner of both the 2024 National Poetry Prize in Spain and the 2024 Spanish Critics’ Prize for Poetry in Galician. The book is translated by her long-time translator—and fellow astonishing poet—Erín Moure. Importantly, Moure’s own poetry has always understood the book as a world (or worlds), of sorts, in which all physics and ecosystems and experiences within are subject to the love- and play-powered lawlessness of poetry itself. This means that the world of the book—its wild logics—permits of paradox, ambiguity, contradiction, the lateral, the unknown, the feminine, the queer, rather than acting as a container of the linear, the statistical, the macho, the cohered, and the factual. Moure as translator/bringer-overer-into-a-Canadian-English of Pato’s Galician insures that we feel—in our bodies—the granular or (then) granite texture of “the linguistic rock” or “the language rock” (19) of Pato’s world.

So! Sonora. Sonora. Sonora. I know that you can’t hear me speaking aloud the title of this book but I’m doing it… with this Canadian unilingual mouth and—this will be especially hard to prove to you (you are way over there!)—this everyday Canuck mouth (my mouth) that is now made of silica, lagoon water, potato skin, yarn, dirt, bird bones, and asphodels. I’m trying to figure out how poetry—when it communicates as the real-deal stuff—is read more by the stomach or the ear or the fingers or the groin or throat or blood than it is by the brain.

Or I’m not trying to figure it out I’m just trying to stay in the sensation of my body-as-the-mind-that-understands-sounds-and-images-as-truth and then to work up the courage to say it and share it here. Reading César Vallejo has this effect on me and reading Wanda Coleman has this effect on me and reading Pato has this sublime, mysterious effect on me, too: the poems communicate themselves nearly as transfusions—as opposed to static messages—to the heart or mind.

Sonora is comprised of nine waves or nine concentric circles and the force of the book—the singular drop that creates these entrancing soundwaves/gongings—is the death of the poet’s mother. I have a sense, too, from the opening poem, of experiencing each poem as a cascade of images—as if multiple colour slides were overlain in the projector and also as if some of the slides depict deep, European history while others depict more local and immediate moments. The opening poem to Sonora begins with these lines:

There are images that are dikes between the body
and the violence of the body
they’re outside memory
they extend like the strata of an exemplary life (9)

In this way each poem presents multiple slides or strata or “imaxes” (“images” in Galician) that carries historical and personal time. My body receives the poems as utterances of history and of the autobiographical and yet so laminated are these scenes/sonorities that they arrive as harmonious differences not as discrete units. As a reader I love this experience because the sensation is of listening and seeing multiplicities all-at-once. The opening poem ends this way:

nourished by roe deer
in the forests of Brabante /
the bloodbath happens
To stand up in the haze
and go off toward somewhere
interminable
the law traversed by the signs that are time (9)

Are we in the ancient Sonian forest watching deer move through the oaks and beeches? At the same time are we hallucinating (“beyond memory”) an entire other life as an imagined being that moves into unknowable pockets of time? Sonora produces a kind of magic for the reading body where one is not reading to extract a single statement but rather to enter, again, a radiant world of colour slides-upon-slides.

If the core of the book creates a multi-rayed elegy for the death of Pato’s mother this death is tied to the roots and to the stones and to the waters of history and time, too. As Moure says in her afterword, “The sonority of death, for Pato, is indeed geolinguistic. In her poems, the sonority of mountains, of granitic domes, of meadows and vegetation covering these domes, of the Antela lagoon, of prehistories and histories, is the sonority of being born and weathering time. Only when we are beyond consolation, the poet says, are we born.” (221) One of the magics of a poetry that communes with the body is to integrate the body back into history—to allow the body to feel its presence throughout time. Sonora—in this living English—is an astonishing work and a momentous event: a capturing of waves of both lyrical and far-reaching historical time, and an expression of the elegiac that ever lends the reader hope and giddy ongoingness.

 

 

 

 

Jake Kennedy—just this morning—saw the paw-prints of mhúyaʔ in the dusty table-top but he did not see mhúyaʔ itself... So the dusty table-top was and must be and is the brief [rain and wind coming] book of the mhúyaʔ. Yes. Thank you!

 


Laura Kerr : Transcendence

 

 

 

the entirety of a rose
cannot be reached

no introduction—
the work begins
already without permission

 




flowers
 not arranged
but handled

pressed into light
not photographed
flattened into existence

petal
leaf
insect
bruise
no hierarchy

the scanner refuses depth
so time enters sideways

white: opening too far
green: already compromised
red: continuation within beauty
rose: unreadable

nothing symbolizes
everything proceeds

system.log:
 loss = distribute (surface = all)

yes—
not located
not behind the image
but everywhere at once

the garden after
not memory
not before

if distance > minimal:
 image.fail ( )

you have to stay close
closer than looking allows

another register—
collapse without staging

stems crossing
petals folding inward
a structure that cannot
hold its own duration

structure.attempt ( )

if structure == stable:
 continue
else:
 collapse ( )

it never holds

no vase
no vase

no containment
only spill

and then—
a body enters
but barely

hands only
identity displaced into gesture

flowers lifted
placed
removed
replaced

this is where I hesitate

again

again

again

again

 

 

while True:
 arrange ( )
 observe ( ) 
 fail ( )
 love ( )

 


the vase remains
the arrangement does not

this is not documentation
this is rehearsal

grief as iteration
not event

grief.mode = "loop"
grief.resolution = None

yes—
that feels right

a space fades
into a procession
of hands arranging

after

agent.identity = dissolved
agent.action = persistent

the loop does not resolve
it maintains

not memorial
not tribute

practice

what can be done
 with what is gone

Spence:
 contact
Hickox:
 repetition

system.map:
 contact → compression
 repetition → sequence

both refuse completion

one presses time
flat

the other
returns it
to sequence

between them—
no transcendence
(not upward)

transcendence = False
direction = None

only this:

to remain
 with the flower

long enough
to see
it does not end

while observing:
 state.change ( )

it changes state
 continuously

and the image—
cannot stop it

only
hold

 the interval

image.process (time)
return interval

yes—
that is what it does

the work does not speak—
it continues

correction:
no introduction, still

Transcendence brings together Sheila Spence’s Lexicon for Loss
and April Hickox’s Observance
at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art,
on view April 10–May 20, 2026.

it stayed with me

correction:

work.execute ( )

yet something still persists

the scent of white roses

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.

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