Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems

Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño's poetry. Her poems draw on motherhood, the loses in the Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1980s and, most of all, the natural world. She is a feminist and her poems show a consciousness of her own body, of being a woman in the pain and wonder of the everyday. But most of all, Oroño has a special awareness of language as a body of its own.
About the Author: Tatiana Oroño (San José, Uruguay, 1947) is Uruguayan poet, writer and teacher. She is the author of nine books including Libro de horas (2017), Estuario (2015), La Piedra Nada Sabe (2008), Morada móvil (2004), El alfabeto verde (1979) and two French editions of her work, Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas/ Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo (2004), translated by Laura Masello, and Ce qu'il faut dire a des fissures (2012), translated by Madeleine Stratford. Naturaleza muerta con derrotas/ Still Life with Defeats: Selected Poems of Tatiana Oroño is the first English-language collection of Oroño's poetry. In 2009, Oroño won the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize in Poetry and the Morosoli Prize for Poetry, two of the most important Uruguayan literary prizes. Her poems have been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Spain, France, and Mexico and, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, in literary magazines such as American Poetry Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, Stand, Western Humanities Review, and World Literature Today. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her books include the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France, winner of the Dorset Prize, The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She was a NEA Translation Fellow. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren, and Reborn in Ink by Laura Cesarco Eglin, co-translated with Catherine Jagoe. She is currently the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.