THE ODD MONTH
Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law--of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity--attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
BLURBS
“Valeria Meiller’s poems in The Odd Month bless us twice. First, they bless us through the excellent, matter-of-fact transparencies of their language. And second, through what that language evokes—the vividness of the mind at its finest pitch and what that mind vividly sees and understands. A moody, gripping, brilliant book.”
—Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 sections and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“The prose poems in The Odd Month fully immerse the reader in the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of a summer drought in the Argentine pampas. Whitney DeVos’s evocative translation crackles like gunfire and murmurs like a hot breeze through a dark room.”
—Corine Tachtiris, author of Translation and Race
“Suffused by fragile shadows, hunting rifles, sugar-lump-sized bunnies, ferocious plums, and a deep longing for rain, these ecological and philosophical fragments capture the weirdness and wonder of living in relationship to a place.”
—Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law--of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity--attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
BLURBS
“Valeria Meiller’s poems in The Odd Month bless us twice. First, they bless us through the excellent, matter-of-fact transparencies of their language. And second, through what that language evokes—the vividness of the mind at its finest pitch and what that mind vividly sees and understands. A moody, gripping, brilliant book.”
—Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 sections and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“The prose poems in The Odd Month fully immerse the reader in the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of a summer drought in the Argentine pampas. Whitney DeVos’s evocative translation crackles like gunfire and murmurs like a hot breeze through a dark room.”
—Corine Tachtiris, author of Translation and Race
“Suffused by fragile shadows, hunting rifles, sugar-lump-sized bunnies, ferocious plums, and a deep longing for rain, these ecological and philosophical fragments capture the weirdness and wonder of living in relationship to a place.”
—Cecily Parks, author of O’Nights
© 2024 Valeria Meiller