Equestrian Monuments/Monumentos ecuestres by Luis Chaves (co-translated with Julia Guez), is out now from After Hours Editions

Praise for Equestrian Monuments :

“In Luis Chaves’s poems, the world becomes an ever-expanding list in a mind that keeps ticking off items, then circling back to check on them again. Yes, the mind says, that was there, that was then. The job is to pare the list down to the truly important, which, it turns out, are the small things that persist until, in the ordinary disorder of our lives, they take on the quality of myth: the fragment of a day, a monument in front of which we posed for a moment, a window in which we once glimpsed an ad. That’s how these brilliant poems work, as a generous invitation to come in and see ‘a slideshow of [the] mind’s own making.’ The haunting particulars stay long after you put down the book.”
—Mary Jo Bang, translator of Inferno and Purgatorio, author of The Last Two Seconds

“I cherish this book. In Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim’s hands, Equestrian Monuments makes me think of poetry as a place where we find all the things we’ve stored and left behind some time ago—those things, invested with their own sense of meaning, like the dense fog of memory, when we pass them by. Carried into English with loving care and astute, capable and generous attention, these poems remind us of a world in constant traffic that serves itself of our anxieties and their furious enumerations, as well as the dream of a life lived in our own private rooms.”
—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

“In Equestrian Monuments, Luis Chaves constitutes a world of white stones in a garden, mixed laundry in a washing machine, clouds in unspecified formation, out-of-focus photographs—an everyday, unadorned world remade with hardly a moment’s notice, then remade again so quickly, its ephemerality appears to define it, to be the point. The gift of Chaves’s poems, for me, is in their testimony that our most urgent metaphysical questions exist alongside, if not inside of, the most quotidian ‘stuff’ of our lives. In this collection, translators Guez and Zighelboim brilliantly capture Chaves’s irreverence, his strange and capacious imagination, and his predilections of syntax and tone, with such an exquisite sensitivity and grace, their translations read as originals, even as we know their source. I am grateful to have this book.”
—Charif Shanahan

“What a masterful translation. A true monument, co-created with great precision and care.”
—Edith Grossman