Intact, Claudia Masin translated by Robin Myers
All written in response to different films, the poems in Claudia Masin’s Intact are concerned with desire, love, suffering, and the stories we tell ourselves about the meaning forged from loss. Expansive, graceful, and incisive, Masin’s poems delve into sensory experience to explore, in her words, “the infinite capacity for transformation of whatever is touched by an intense desire” – and the mark left by grief, which is a transformation in itself. Ultimately, Intact is a call to wonderment and vitality from one of Argentina’s most beloved contemporary poets.
Cover photo "Constellation," 2015 by Genesis Báez
Claudia Masin, writer and psychoanalyst, was born in the province of Chaco, Argentina, in 1972. She is the author of twelve poetry collections: Bizarría (1997), Geología (2001), La vista (2002), Abrigo (2007), El secreto (2007), El verano (2010), La plenitud (2010), La cura (2016), La siesta (2017), Lo intacto (2018), La desobediencia (collected poems, 2018), and El cuerpo (2020). She lives in Córdoba, Argentina. Poems from Intact have appeared, in Robin Myers’s translation, in The Common, Caesura, and Words Without Borders as a winner of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets).
Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her latest translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books), The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada (Deep Vellum Publishing), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek (Charco Press), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), and Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books). A 2023 NEA Translation Fellow, she was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry.