After Hours Editions To Publish ‘Equestrian Monuments,’ Co-Translated by Julia Guez '11 and Samantha Zighelboim '11

Equestrian Monuments, a poetry collection by Luis Chaves and co-translated by two alumnae, Julia Guez ‘11 and Assistant Professor Samantha Zighelboim ‘11, will be published by After Hours Editions early 2022.

The collection, originally published in 2011 by Editorial Germinal, follows former Costa Rican president Leon Cortés, whose stately presence is counterbalanced by “a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a drag queen, a singleton, homunculus, thief, and gardener.” The collection utilizes dialogue from The Exorcist and lines from the Latin Kyrie, Rex, and Chaves masterfully couches sweeping statements about entire generations, continents, and genres within the details of domestic life.

According to alumna and poet Mary Jo Bang ‘98, “In Luis Chaves’s poems, the world becomes an ever-expanding list in a mind that keeps ticking off items, then circling back to check on them again...The job is to pare the list down to the truly important, which, it turns out, are the small things that persist until, in the ordinary disorder of our lives, they take on the quality of myth: the fragment of a day, a monument in front of which we posed for a moment, a window in which we once glimpsed an ad...The haunting particulars stay long after you put down the book.”

Equestrian Monuments is Luis Chaves’s seventh book of poetry and his first to be published in English. The collection is now available for pre-order from After Hours Editions.

Guez is the author of In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (Four Way Books, 2019). Her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in Poetry, Guernica, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, PEN Poetry Series, and The Brooklyn Rail. Four Way Books will be releasing her next collection of poems, The Certain Body, in 2022. Guez teaches creative writing at Rutgers and is the senior managing director of program design and implementation at Teach For America New York.

Zighelboim is the author of The Fat Sonnets (Argos Books, 2018). She is a 2017 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Poetry, a recipient of a Face Out grant from CLMP, and the recipient of the 2016 John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation from The Poetry Foundation. Her poems, translations and essays have appeared in POETRY, Boston Review, Lit Hub, The Guardian, PEN Poetry Series, Guernica, Stonecutter, Fanzine, and The Poetry Society of America, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design at The New School.