Review
"Immanent Visitor is a triumphant procession of that hallucinated angel, Jaime Saenz, carried into English by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander." - Eliot Weinberger
Product Description
An English-language translation of the work of one of Bolivia's visionary 20th-century poets. A poete maudit, Jaime Saenz rejected the conventions of polite society and became a monk in service of his own imagination. Apocalyptic and occult in his politics, a denizen of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. In translations by two poet-translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, Saenz's strange, innovative, and lyrical poems reveal a literary legacy of fierce compassion and solidarity with indigenous Bolivian cultures and with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised of that unreal city, La Paz. In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture.