Against the Current

The poems in Against the Current expose a mind moving fast as water. Tedi Lopez Mills renders a river as a cool but contaminated space, propelling its detritus through a hybrid rural/urban zone that is inhabited by allegory and rife with collision. As the poems swim upstream, they accrue the impurities and complicities of memory, embodied in the central figure of the brother who is also the other. Wendy Burk reproduces the baroque, occasionally frenetic rhythms of the abecedarian original with lucidity, in these poems that underscore that Mexico is defined by physical and philosophical contrast.

Tedi Lopez Mills is one of Mexico's foremost poets writing today. Born in Mexico City in 1959, she studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and literature at the Sorbonne. She is the author of ten books of poetry and two essay collections, several of which have received national literary prizes, including the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, "Mexico's Pulitzer Prize," for her verse novelMuerte en la rua Augusta (2009). Lopez Mills sets the pace for her contemporaries with work that is linguistically inventive and philosophically rigorous. She invokes the classics, the troubadours, and the pastoral tradition with an underlying skepticism about language, landscape, and causality that keeps her work current, engaging the eye while troubling the "I." She lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

Wendy Burk was the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translateAgainst the Current. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Deer andThe Place Names The Place Named, and the translator of Tedi Lopez Mills’s While Light Is Built. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Colorado Review, and other journals. She lives in Tucson, AZ.