[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
Thank you to every one of you.
I am very grateful to all of you.
Thank you, Lisa.
I'm going to spend about 10 minutes on each of two books.
And the first book is a book of translations
called "Against the Current".
It's by Tedi Lopez Mills.
And because these poems are very long,
I'm going to read two of them and precede them
with a little bit of an introduction I wrote for them.
"Against the current is a Baroque and speculative work
toned with deep skepticism.
Its principal mood is the subjunctive,
the mood of futurity, contingency,
and wishful thinking.
In this, her eighth book of poems,
celebrated Mexican author Tedi Lopez Mills
uses forceful intricate fancies to engage a sequence of deeply
felt problems from political to familial
and existential to ecological.
The problems of which "Against the Current"
forms apart include how to be, how
to love, how to acknowledge violence,
how to compass identity, and how to exist
alongside the non-human.
The biggest one, I believe, as introduced
by the central character of the brother
in relationship to the speaker and by the central allegory
of a wrathful elusive river is how to be angry,
how to be furious, and yet how to contain this fury,
channel it within the confines of a human person who
can be albeit simultaneously recognized
as such because the poem's distrust any form
of direct advice even when it is offered from one self
to oneself.
In "Against the Current", to say how to is also
to imply its opposite--
how to not love, for example, or how to not be.
As the title suggests, to read "Against the Current"
is to undertake a productive struggle.
The book proposes a pessimistic reading of reality
in which cynicism and falsehoods predominate.
Within the pessimism, there is possibility,
in one sense, constrained, and in another, unbridled.
Like water, the poems hold so much.
Observing the multitude of images float by,
we readers can throw in our own concerns
and see them become a part of the mix reflected
in the water's mirror.
Mindful of all that this water contains
finely tuned philosophy and allegory
as well as motor oil and plastic bottles,
scorn and betrayal, material and emotional detritus.
We might choose with care that concerns desires and fears
that we project onto the poems of "Against the Current".
Rivers flow to the ocean, the source of life.
If we throw what we choose into the water,
we know where it will be carried."