Contributors

Eléna Rivera
Contributor History

Biography
Eléna Rivera is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and the author of Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006) and In Respect of Distance (Beard of Bees, 2007). Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secrets of the Breath is just out from Burning Deck Press, and other translations can be found in the Chicago Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Circumference: Poetry in Translation, and Tarpaulin Sky. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

October 2, 2024
It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
 
September 25, 2024
My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.

She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
September 18, 2024
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
The internationally renowned writer will read from her work.
Monday, October 21, 2024
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Chapel of the Holy Innocents