EROS IS MORE

By Juan Antonio González Iglesias

Alice James Books, 2014

“The voice of Juan Antonio González Iglesias, translated with great beauty by Curtis Bauer, seems miraculous in its clarity. Crucial and inevitable, the poems speak directly from our time, and simultaneously through the layers of time. I lifted my face from reading as from fresh essential water. This is poetry that resuscitates.”
—Marie Howe

“Contemplative and utterly sensual, Bauer’s translation of Eros Is More stands at the brink of oblivion with such tenderness, gratitude, and reverence for the brief bodies of things (birds, lovers, letters) that we cannot help but be emboldened by these poems. Provocatively and playfully they enliven my thinking and seeing: ‘October, like a truce. Like an absence of everything/ that exceeds limits. May it be for us/ liberation.’ This is a beautifully masterful collection, at once lucid and mysterious. In this book we are in the hands of two generous and beautiful poets.”
—Aracelis Girmay

“Eros is more or less everything in the magical world of Juan Antonio Gonzláez Iglesias. What good luck to have his poems in the elegant translations of Curtis Bauer, for here is a poet who understands the centrality of love, or, more precisely, beauty, to our works and days—a theme that he explores with rigor, wit, and wisdom.”
—Christopher Merrill