Here are the blurbs:
“If Baudelaire’s
crowds swept the individual into the city, then the masses of Perlongher’s
‘Corpses’ are themselves being swept away by a tyrannical state. They leave
behind traces of sexual energy, fear, the degradation of Buenos Aires. Snatched
from this is a personal and nameless lived existence, the heat of anonymous
encounter, the detailing of clothes worn, of families and body parts and police
stations. This is a poetry from inside the multitude at the moment of its
destruction. It sits on the edge between an introspection that would return
those masses to individuals for the sake of memory, and one that tries to do
justice to the memory, however fearful and violent, of living together.”
– Jacob Bard-Rosenberg
“It is impossible to find
words to describe what this poem achieves, or rather inaugurates, but the poem
itself, miraculously, finds its words with simplicity and increasing
insistence, sinking its barbs into our minds and into our bodies with its
repeated refrain, ‘There are Corpses’.
It envisions a world, our world, in which political violence haunts the
fabric of the real in its minutiae, in its peanut sellers, in its fishermen’s
nets, in its jokes about ants, in the sputum imprinted on a prick. Written, as the Endnote explains, in response
to the disappearance of some 30,000 people under Argentina’s military regime in
the 80s, it resonates also in the UK today, where the rubbished margins of the
British government’s self-proclaimed success story cry out for a justice of their
own. This is a poem that calls out
across languages, across continents and across generations, and it can sit,
though not comfortably, beside Rimbaud’s A
Season in Hell, Akhmatova’s Requiem, and
Ginsberg’s Howl. Buy it, or steal it.”
– Philip Terry
