The Smoke of Distant Fires

January 17, 2012poems | pb | 122 pgs5.5" x 8.5" 978-1-934824-38-2 “Complex and multidimensional, The Smoke of Distant Fires encompasses a wholeness for vision, one that’s expansive, even symphonic.” —From the Introduction by Daniel Shapiro The Smoke of Distant Firescontains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world. The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early