Dawn of the Senses: Selected Poems of Alberto Blanco

An impressive selection, in bilingual format, from the work of one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary writers.

Born in Mexico City in 1951, Alberto Blanco is a dynamic and influential voice in the new poetry of Mexico. A musician, artist, essayist, translator, and storyteller, his poetry explores the connections on frontiers between verbal, visual, and aural experience. He is both an innovator and a classicist, a materialist and a mystic, a visionary and a chronicler of everyday life.

Here his poems converse with their English translations, to create “a singular book…not simply a bilingual edition, but one unified voice, a poetry that speaks of a world far beyond languages and borders,” (from the introduction by Jose Emilio Pacheco).

“The meticulous and loving catalog of moments, animals, plants, beings, suns, and nocturnal revelations that this poetry offers us constitutes–in my way of thinking–a terrible oracle, and at last a shout of hope. To say it in a simpler, more direct way, it is a prayer.” –Alvaro Mutis

“Alberto Blanco’s deep poetry inhabits both the world and the universe of imagination; these poems shed their own light and fly on their own wings.” –Michael McClure

Juvenal Acosta is an author who has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is now a teacher at the California College of the Arts. His books include The Tattooed Hunter and The Violence of Velvet.

José Emilio Pacheco (1939-2014) was a Mexican poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. He has been regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the 20th Century.