Ova Completa

Susana Thénon (trans. Rebekah Smith)

Susana Thénon (1935–1991) is a key poet of the ’60s generation in Argentina. In Ova Completa, her final, most radical collection, Thénon’s poetics expands to incorporate all it touches—classical and popular culture, song lyrics and vulgarities, incoherence and musicality—embodying humor and terror while writing obliquely of femicide, Argentina’s last dictatorship, the Malvinas / Falklands war, the heritage of colonialism. Ova Completa is a collection full of stylistic innovation, language play, dark humor, and socio-political insight, or, as Thénon writes, “me on earth; me with the others; me ignorant, rude, all mixed in Latin, Greek, shit, noodles, culture, and barbarism.”

'This is the first time I’ve endorsed a book after reading a handful of poems because I’ve never encountered a handful of poems this intriguing. Is Susana Thénon Jorge Louis Borges' long lost daughter, is she Juan Gelman’s sister, or is she a star from some wholly underrecognized dimension? It took just a sampling of Ova Completa to expand both my sense of the Argentinian literary landscape and my sense of poetic innovation. I can’t wait to read the rest of this rich and resonating collection.' – Terrance Hayes

'I’m in disbelief that these poems were written over thirty years ago by someone born in 1935. How can it be? Susana Thénon’s flair for code-switching—from Argentine regionalisms to mock etymologies to an ever-seductive English—seems ahead of its time, as do her poems’ fragmentariness, skepticism of language and its institutions. (Vide letters, bureaucracy.) Clearly, they weren’t, but that’s the magic of their immediacy and of Rebekah Smith’s brilliant translations. Caustic, restless, and delighting in their own performativity, they’ll make you want to catch up with them.' – Mónica de la Torre