I don’t know how Jeannette Lozano Clariond’s Even Time Bleeds came to be in my possession. I walked into the English office one day to check my mailbox and there was a copy. I decided to read it at once. After finishing, I immediately turned back to the first poem and started again. I was like a man crawling through a desert as these poems fell like manna from the sky, revealing an oasis I didn’t realize I needed.

Jeannette Lozano Clariond is a Mexican poet born to a family of Lebanese immigrants. The blessing of beginning with her selected poems is that we are hand-delivered her greatest hits. While this is often a tactical move on the part of the translator––meant to drum up interest so that full collections can be translated in the future––it also allows readers to grasp the poet’s central obsessions: the philosophical legacy of exiles, the lyricism of metaphysics, and “translat[ing] the spirit of the world” through the word (xiv). One thing becomes clear throughout this English language debut: Jeannette Lozano Clariond is a poet of immense vision, whose poems startle the mind as much as they do the body.

The book’s namesake comes at the end of the first poem, “Post Canto,” which unflinchingly imagines the speaker as a victim of femicide. The speaker, both among the bodies and beyond them, asks: “And what could ever be written of the screams and choking / that still echo faintly beneath the water . . . I dream their faces as the preamble to an endless despair” (5-7). This could be about murder in Mexico, or about those trying to cross the border into the US. It could be anywhere. The fact that any of these answers can ring true suggests a horrific reality. Lozano Clariond’s solution––at least insofar as the ordering within the book suggests––is to interrogate the written word as a means toward survival.

Each poem in the collection, itself a record of Lozano Clariond’s towering career, represents a reality from which we can pull another thread of the truth. The moves she makes are as imagistically surreal as they are emotionally resonant. The widening tapestry of the text develops a clear circling around the word. Just as she embarks on discovering what the written word means for her existence, so too does it become the reader’s task. In “Corylus avallana” (or common hazel, a plant native to Europe and Western Asia) she writes: “My words never quite fit. / The river in which we see ourselves tells a lie: the light / of the word will forever remain a form of absence: / a radiance flowing past the edge of sight” (31). A great absence undergirds the entire book. Yet, the ways in which the poet pushes into new modes of being suggests that, for her, the word remains the way through to truth.

Structurally, Lozano Clariond and Gander made a fantastic choice in the overall layout of the book. Brief sections from Ammonites, poems whose sections tend to contain single, koan-like lines, bridge larger selected excerpts. This allows readers to slow down and consider the wider philosophical and metaphysical ways in which Lozano Clariond circles her obsessions. It is also where the book ends: “I spiral back to where time begins, once again” (145). 

With an ending line like that, how could I not turn back to the first page and read the book again? The poems in English are heady and moving, printed alongside the Spanish, which allows you to cross borders in record time. In a day and age where the world feels ever-closer to ending, we need more writers and translators like Jeannette Lozano Clariond and Forrest Gander to remind us that the way we choose to view the world makes all the difference.