“Nicanor Parra over everyone else, including Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro and Gabriela Mistral.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Nicanor Parra
“Nicanor Parra over everyone else, including Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro and Gabriela Mistral.”
— Roberto Bolaño on Nicanor Parra
20th Century Chilean Poet
A Chilean poet and physicist born in 1914, Parra has taken the precision of scientific language and the plain speech of North American modernism and mixed it with his own sardonic humor to invent what he calls “antipoetry,” a poetry pitched against Latin American high rhetoric. New Directions has published Poems and Antipoems (1967); Emergency Poems (1972); Antipoems: New and Selected (1985); and Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great (2004). Also in English translation is Sermons and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui.
Antipoems: How To Look Better & Feel Great
Antipoems: New And Selected
photo credit: Andres Sanchez
“If you expect the staid reflections of an elder poet, you've come to the wrong book. Parra is as vital, and funny, and confounding as ever.”
— Edith Grossman on Nicanor Parra's Antipoems: How To Look Better & Feel Great
