The Odd Month
The Odd Month
by Valeria Meiller, translated by Whitney DeVos
Paperback / 104p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1-939568-91-5
Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
Valeria Meiller is an Argentine writer and scholar who is assistant professor of social and environmental challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the author of four collections of poetry in Spanish.
Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard as well as a cotranslator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 and Hugo García Manríquez's Commonplace / Lo común. With Valeria Meiller and Javiera Pérez-Salerno, she coedits Ruge el bosque, a series of regional ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. A 2022 NEA fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.
“The Odd Month is a stunning volume of prose poetry constructed of a multilayered world of different spaces and times. . . . Whitney DeVos’s skilled translation successfully brings into English this imaginary layer of existence, conjuration, and possibility.”
“Here it is not the natural world that terrorizes; instead, everything is terrified, tired, quieted. Human frailty diffuses into the wind, the rabbits, the grasses, and this transference of distinct, segregated psyches allows the poet to clearly render what is truly petrifying about living at the end of the world: how easily fear spreads, and how alone we are inside of it.”
“Valeria Meiller’s poems in The Odd Month bless us twice. First, they bless us through the excellent, matter-of-fact transparencies of their language. And second, through what that language evokes—the vividness of the mind at its finest pitch and what that mind vividly sees and understands. A moody, gripping, brilliant book.”
“The prose poems in The Odd Month fully immerse the reader in the sights, sounds, smells, and touch of a summer drought in the Argentine pampas. Whitney De Vos’s evocative translation crackles like gunfire and murmurs like a hot breeze through a dark room.”
“Moody and evocative, the poems in The Odd Month beguiled me. Suffused by fragile shadows, hunting rifles, sugar-lump-sized bunnies, ferocious plums, and a deep longing for rain, these ecological and philosophical fragments capture the weirdness and wonder of living in relationship to a place.”
