Amherst Suite: Emily Dickinson, Spanish Translation & Poetic Transcreation is a dialogue between Emily Dickinson and Alberto Blanco, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed contemporary poets. At the book’s heart is a selection of Dickinson’s most emblematic poems, masterfully translated into Spanish by Blanco—fifty-five poems to celebrate each year of Emily Dickinson’s life. Blanco’s translations closely match Dickinson’s metric and rhythm while also preserving her signature imagery, symbols, and moods. Following these translations is Blanco’s collection of original poems dedicated to Dickinson, "Amherst Suite," translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun for the first time. Staying true to Dickinson’s style, Blanco uses dashes, unusual capitalization, vivid imagery, quatrains, and rhyme while exploring her recurring themes—nature, mortality, and spirituality. Bold and innovative, Blanco’s “suite” unites the American and Mexican poetic traditions. 

Opening with a creative essay by renowned author Ilan Stavans, the volume also includes a conversation between Blanco and scholar Ronald J. Friis; Blanco’s own essay on Dickinson, translated into English by Jennifer Rathbun; as well as an introduction by Rathbun that helpfully situates this interlinguistic, intercultural, and inter-generational network. Amherst Suite is a fascinating and unique look into the work and worlds of poets and their translators and will be an invaluable text for students, scholars, and all readers of Emily Dickinson. 

White Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco examines the interplay of complementary images and concepts in the award-winning Mexican writer's cycle of poems from 1979 to 2018. Blanco’s poetic trilogy A la luz de siempre is characterized by its broad range of form and subject and by the poet's own eclectic background as a chemist, maker of collages, and musician. Blanco speaks the language of the visual arts, science, mathematics, music, and philosophy, and creates work with deep interdisciplinary roots. This book explores how polarities such as space and place, reading and writing, sound and silence, visual and verbal representation, and faith and doubt are woven through A la luz de siempre. These complements reveal how Blanco’s poetry, like the phenomenon of white light, embraces paradox and transforms into something more than the sum of its disparate and polychromatic parts.