I am a poet obsessed with life, eternity, and with the bridges that unite them: beauty and death. I believe that silence is the language of the cosmos and that every poem is an act of triple communication with ourselves, others, and transcendence…
Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Mexican Poet living in the United States. Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020). He received the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams…
ISBN: 978-195-3252-24-1 / POESÍA / MARZO, 2021.
Manuel Iris reclaims the poetic space as a radical exploration and celebration of paternal love and tenderness. If language is a vector of truth and transformation, if “the poem opens its wound” to the spaces in which we examine ourselves and love begets love, the poems in this bilingual collection offer the magnitude and direction to do exactly what poetry aims to do: say in words what can never be expressed in words. Iris’ poems reveal the silences of our most vulnerable selves, and “the silence/ toward which we migrate,/ from which we came.”
Tara Skurtu
ISBN: 978-607-8775-02-6 / POESÍA / MARZO, 2021.
In the haunting poems of Translating Silence, Manuel Iris recognizes the ecstatic hush in certain moments of stillness, and their potential to offer transcendence from daily sorrows. Iris translates the silence of some of our most powerful feelings, of love, of homesickness, of lost time, and renders it into odes that celebrate the richness of those very same experiences. Like the transparent birds that take wing in these poems, Manuel Iris is a poet who transports his reader so subtly she hardly realizes she has been moved, yet finds utter delight in her new surrounding.
Jesse Graves
