Juan Arabia is a poet, translator, literary critic, editor and publisher. Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he is founder and director of the cultural and literary project Buenos Aires Poetry. Arabia is also in-house literary critic for the Cultural Supplement of Diario Perfil and Revista Ñ of Diario Clarín. Among his most recent poetry titles are Desalojo de la Naturaleza [Eviction of Nature] (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), Hacia Carcassonne [Towards Carcassonne] (Pre-Textos, 2021), and Bulmenia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022). After the publication of El enemigo de los Thirties [Enemy of the Thirties] (2013), awarded in France, Italy, and Macedonia, Juan participated in several poetry festivals in Latin America, Europe, and China. In 2018, on behalf of Argentina, he was invited to the “Voix vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée” poetry festival in Sète (France). The following year he became the second Latin American poet to be invited to the “Poetry Comes to Museum LXI,” sponsored by the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum. Arabia has translated works by Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, and Dan Fante, among others. Two of his books have been translated into French (L’Océan Avare, trad. Jean Portante, Al Manar, 2018) and Italian (Verso Carcassonne, trad. Mattia Tarantino, Raffaelli Editore, 2022). Some of his poems have been featured or are forthcoming in English translation by Patricio Ferrari in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence, among others. He lives in Retiro (Buenos Aires) with his wife — the designer, poet, and literary translator Camila Evia — and son Cátulo.

 

 

Retiro

Algún rascacielos se escinde en su altura pero la visión total no es whitmaniana las líneas horizontales vencen a las verticales y las esquinas, a pesar del gris plata, todavía alimentan las antiguas orillas de su vientre, convocando inevitables suburbios que se esconden y que parecen derrotados, aunque respiran, caminan y duermen bajo tus talones

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Unpublished (Nueva Poesía, 2024)