The River is Wide/El Rio Es Ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets, A Bilingual Anthology

This bilingual anthology of contemporary Mexican poetry reflects a broad continuum of styles and offers generous selections from the writings of twenty poets. Marlon Fick worked directly with each poet and selected the poems to be included here on the basis of aesthetic merit, the authors’ reputations, and the representational quality of the work with regard to Mexican literature. Fick chose to include only twenty poets to allow the incorporation of generous selections from the writings of each. He includes long poems such as Ali Chumacero’s ‘Responso del peregrino’, a poem on the scale of T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. The oldest poet is Chumacero, who is in his eighties, and the youngest, Hernan Bravo Varela, winner of Mexico’s National Prize for Young Poets, is in his twenties. The other Mexican poets are Coral Bracho, Hector Carreto, Elsa Cross, Juan Cu, Jorge Ruiz Esparza, Jorge Esquinca, Gloria Gervitz, Francisco Hernandez, Elva Macias, Myriam Moscona, Ruben Bonifaz Nuno, Oscar Oliva, Jaime Sabines, Tomas Segovia, Lillian van den Broeck, Veronica Volkow, Francisco Avila Fuentes, and Bernardo Emilio Perez.