BOOK
Mongrel Tongue is a collection of prose poems and hybrid texts, selected by National Book Award winner, Daniel Borzutzky for the 1913 Prize for First Books.
PURCHASE
In the US, you get order a copy from Small Press Distribution, Powell’s, Bookshop or Barnes & Noble. (It is also at the evil empire, but please don’t support the place that kills bookstores!)
In Europe, order via INDEX Poetry (or the evil empire).
Or pick up a copy in person!
Amsterdam: The American Book Center, Boekhandel van Rossum, and Boekie Woekie
New York: Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop
ABOUT
This collection of prose poems and hybrid texts explores what’s left out of the official history, the movie version, the news account, the branding campaign. Latin Americans exiled in surreal landscapes, women on the lam from the eternal feminine, and people awake to the breakdown of the general narrative take shape in monologues, interviews, fractured fairy tales, and alternative histories.
See the News page for information on readings and events.
“These are half stories from a fully experienced observer, peering out at the light that brings her the news. The new world is here still being discovered by a woman we recognize by her likeness to another woman we don’t recognize. A prophetic and hilarious book.”
—Fanny Howe
“ With lyrical brilliance and discipline, Megin Jiménez’s Mongrel Tongue swerves through the many ways we live with and among disaster. The narratives here are boundless; everywhere there is a body searching for home, a political exile, a climate refugee, a body that’s absorbed, a body that refuses to be absorbed, a body that refuses to disappear into history. I’m thrilled by the vibrancy of this debut, by the worlds it creates amid worlds that make us vanish.”
—Daniel Borzutzky
“Eschewing purity of all kinds, the prose poems and hybrid pieces in Mongrel Tongue call themselves novel, document, story, tale, interview, history, invocation. This startling book revels in the translator’s gulf, nomadically moving through the clutter of the world, offering slippages and valences galore.”
—Shanna Compton
About
Megin Jiménez is a Venezuelan-American translator, poet and writer. She studied at the University of Denver and Université de Paris IV, and received an MFA from The New School in New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Barrelhouse, Mantis, Tarpaulin Sky and other journals. She teaches at the International Writers’ Collective and lives in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Translation and Editing
Megin worked for ten years as a translator and reviser at United Nations Headquarters in New York and the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She currently works as a freelance translator, editor and report-writer for international organizations. For more information, visit her LinkedIn page or contact her at the email address below.
Contact
Email: meginj [at] gmail.com
Twitter: @meginlj
Header image: 1565 map by Ferando Bertelli and Paolo Forlani, Library of Congress