What Comes Back

by Javier Peñalosa, Robin Myers (Translator)

Overview

Veering between past and present, between ecological destruction and human violence, What Comes Back is a search for what has vanished and what remains. 

Javier Peñalosa M.’s What Comes Back is a procession, a journey, a search for a body of water that has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Featured in separate sections, original Spanish poems and Robin Myers’ English translations highlight tender ruminations on loss, memory, and communion. Just as landscapes witness and “preserve what happens along the length of them,” so do people. We watch as travelers navigate realms between the living and the dead, past mountains and dried up rivers to map, trace, and remember the past and future. Several sections, each bearing the title “What Comes Back,” guide readers on a looping voyage where they are “orbited around the gravity of what had come to be”—the absence of Mexico City’s rivers, and other absences wrought by war, climate change, and forced migration. Rattled between ecological destruction and human violence, What Comes Back, what remains, is a desire to name the missing, to render belonging out of dispossession, endurance out of erasure—the spiritual urge toward connection and community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596841
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	04/30/2024
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born and raised in Mexico City, Javier Peñalosa (he/him) is an award-winning poet, children’s book author, and screenwriter. He holds a BA in education and an MFA in creative writing in Spanish from NYU. His poetry collections include Los que regresan, which won the 2017 Xirau Icaza Poetry Prize, and Los trenes que partían de mí, which won the 2009 Enriqueta Ochoa National Poetry Award. Additionally, he has earned fellowships from the fundación para las letras mexicanas, Mexico’s Young Artists Program (FONCA), and the Immigrant Artist Program from the New York Fund for the Arts. As a screenwriter, he has contributed to many acclaimed films and TV series including Juana Inés, The Eternal Feminine, and Malinche. Currently, he is a member of the Writers Guild of America West and is at work on several collaborative, multidisciplinary projects.

Robin Myers (she/her) is a prolific Spanish-to-English translator and poet based in Mexico City. In 2019, she won the Academy of American Poets’ Words in Translation Contest, and she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award. Her own poetry was selected by Matthew Zapruder for the Best American Poetry Anthology in 2022 and has appeared widely in journals such as Kenyon Review, Granta, and Harvard Review. Her books have received international attention, with bilingual English-Spanish editions published in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Her recent book-length translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, Copy by Dolores Dorantes, and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero. She received a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for her in-progress translation of Like the Night Inside the Eyes by David Lipara.

Read an Excerpt

from What Comes Back

In the morning, someone from the mountains began to

whistle as we walked.

The bird is called brown-backed solitaire. I heard it once around

midday. There were other cages, too, and in the spaces

between the wires, there were cardinals, finches, canaries, and

parakeets, their throats serene.

And he kept whistling all the way down the San Juan slope.

And I remembered his song in someone else’s mouth and I

felt like shattering something made of clay.

It was going to rain. The clouds sank low. They were very

heavy and it smelled like damp. I closed my eyes.

from What Comes Back

This is all that’s left of him: on one of the walls in the yard,

his height was marked with a pencil-point.

A body’s marginalia on the wall.

A back leaning against the cold stone and every year a

horizontal line traced across the top of his head.

Here is a mark for the year the lemon tree bore fruit, and

another mark for when his teeth grew in. And this last mark

is his limit with the world.

from What Comes Back

We set out when the last thrush took flight. I made a mark in

the dirt with my toe.

We walked. We walked all day. There were three of us, five of

us, sometimes nine.

The oldest of us would speak aloud, but his words bore no

resemblance to what we saw.

Each of us brought along his own signs and his own body to

interpret them.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for What Comes Back

“Mexican poet and screenwriter Peñalosa M.'s bilingual collection is prescient and quietly mesmerizing. The geography of a ruined landscape ruminates with spectral voices, each in its own way attempting an accounting of a seemingly directionless trek through a subverted ecology of dried riverbeds and inventories of flotsam and jetsam abandoned like the dreams that carried them. . . . Peñalosa M. gives voice to the displaced and chronicles and preserves, for a time, their journeys.”—Raúl Niño, Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

“A series of portraits, perhaps cubist, perhaps multiple angles at the same time, such energy, and after the presentation of the acute upon the acute, the obtuse upon the obtuse, what the reader is left with is the energy to keep reading. To read again. To flip through the pages, proceeding like footsteps across desert path, to consider the restlessness of time and history and future, to be active and to be an active participant. To activate. To read.”—Greg Bem, North of Oxford

Praise for Javier Peñalosa

“A collection that hasn’t so much been written as cultivated, then planted in the reader and transformed into an inner book: a work both memorable and untransferable, existing on the border between the novel and the poem, between the play and the hymn.”—Adolfo Castañón

“Peñalosa’s syntax connects everlasting ideas and brings them closer to speech with a flowing language. He circulates and draws a map of his history, which is that of a good part of the maturity of young Mexican poetry.”—Ignacio Ballester

“A story of solidarity amid scarcity, a study of landscape, a record of what can only be learned on foot.”—Juan Villoro

Praise for Robin Myers’ Spanish-to-English Translations

“Guerrero’s collection, . . . thanks to Robin Myers, feels as much a collection of poetry as it does a document of rebellion, a manifesto, a toolkit on how to think about connectedness and ecology.”—Greg Bem

“Unaffected yet profound, casual but alert to the innate dignity of life, the poem that Robin Myers has brought us does what great poems do: show us the ancient in the contemporary, the lightness in the gravity, the gleaming thread of the sacred woven everywhere in the commonplace.”—Conor Bracken

From the Publisher