11

“Carlos Soto Román’s work teaches us that history doesn’t just happen, but is always happening to us. Language, when touched by the questions of the present, is revived, exploding in every direction, especially toward the future. Writing becomes reading. And aesthetics, a political statement. This book tackles the most ferocious challenge for any writer: to produce reality. Another reality.”

Cristina Rivera Garza

“In 11, Soto-Román uses appropriation in order to exaggerate or intensify censorship, in a negative poetics that in no way falls into the trap of nihilism or negativism itself… the interface or conceptualist machine that he builds employs various tactics of resistance in order to make absences and silences speak… In 11, the reality of the erased, crossed out, and the altered page is indeed the fiction of itself. We do not confront the end of poetry here; however, the attentive reader of 11 does indeed witness an impressive, apocalyptic gesture, even within the storied tradition of experimental and radical Chilean poetry.”

Scott Weintraub

Author Biographies

Carlos Soto Román (Valparaíso, 1977) is a poet, translator, and pharmacist. He holds an MA in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Naropa. While living in the United States, he was a member of the New Philadelphia Poets Collective, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and curated the anthology of US poetry Elective Affinities. He has participated in numerous readings, symposia, talks, and festivals in Chile, the United States, and Europe.

In the United States, he has published Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths), Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (Gauss PDF), The Exit Strategy (Belladonna), Alternative Set of Procedures (Corollary Press), Bluff (Commune Editions), and Common Sense (Make Now Press). In the United Kingdom, he has published Nature of Objects (Pamenar Press), and in Chile he has published La Marcha de los Quiltros, Haikú Minero, Cambio y Fuera, 11, Densidad (d=m/V), and Antuco, the latter in collaboration with Carlos Cardani Parra. He translated the first Spanish-language version of Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff.

His work can be found in the American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Apiary, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Crux Desperationis, Mandorla, MAKE Magazine, Pennsound, Tiny Mag, Aufgabe, Jacket2, Asymptote, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, A Perfect Vacuum, Periodicities, Latin American Literature Today, and Pensamiento Político. His book 11 was awarded the 2018 Municipal Poetry Prize in Santiago, Chile.

Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse) and most recently the translator of Dalia Rosetti’s Dreams and Nightmares (Les Figues) and co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Her poems, prose, translations, and interviews have recently appeared in FENCE, Oversound, BOMB, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and edits 18 Owls Press.

Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Action Books Blog, Propagule, ergot, Self Fuck, New South, Burning House Press, Alwayscrashing, and elsewhere. He’s the author of numerous chapbooks of poetry, most recently Total Darkness Means No Notifications (Anstruther Press) and Anatomizing Uncanny Alley (Self Fuck). His full-length collection of poetry, You Alive Home Yet? is available from Schism Neuronics and he recently released a splatterpunk novel Blood Pudding (World Castle Publishing) and a post-apocalyptic novella The Mother of Flowers (The Wild Rose Press). Daniel’s first collection of short stories, Funeralopolis (Orbis Tertius Press), and existential horror novel Lord of Chaos (Erratum Press) will be published in 2023. He is also co-founder of OOMPH!, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry and prose in translation.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures and cultures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec (Ugly Duckling) and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard (Ugly Duckling), as well as co-translator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling) and Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común (Cardboard House). Involved in various collaborative editorial endeavors, most recently she co-edited Ruge el bosque: ecopoesía del cono sur (Caleta Olivia), the first volume in a series of multilingual ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. Currently a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.

Jèssica Pujol Duran (Barcelona, 1982) is a poet, translator and researcher, currently working as Assistant Professor at the University of Santiago de Chile. She writes and translates in Catalan, English and Spanish, and has three chapbooks in English, Now Worry (Department, 2012), Every Bit of Light (Oystercatcher Press, 2012) and Mare (Carnaval Press, 2018); two books in Catalan, El país pintat (Pont del petroli, 2015) and ninó (Pont del petroli, 2019), and two in Spanish, Entrar es tan difícil salir (Veer Books, 2016), with translations by William Rowe, and El campo envolvente (LP5 Editora, 2021). She is the editor of the magazine Alba Londres.

Patrick Greaney is Professor of Humanities at the University of Colorado Boulder. He edited Conceptual and Other Fictions: The Collected Writings of Eduardo Costa, 1965–2015 (Les Figues Press, 2016), and his translations include Heimrad Bäcker’s SEASCAPE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) and, as co-translator, Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023).

Robin Myers is a poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her latest and forthcoming translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books), The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada (Deep Vellum Publishing), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press). A 2023 NEA Translation Fellow, she was double-longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry. She lives in Mexico City.

Thomas Rothe is a translator and scholar of Latin American and Caribbean literatures. His research focuses on the history of translation, print and popular culture, and critical discourses throughout the region. He has translated the poetry of Jaime Huenún, Rodrigo Lira, Emma Villazón, and Julieta Marchant, and co-translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously and Claire of the Sea Light. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow (Fondecyt/ANID), associated with the Universidad Católica de Temuco, and lectures at several universities in Chile.

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