"Argentine writer and translator Cortázar (1914-1984), best known for his inventive fiction, beguiles in this expanded bilingual second edition of his poems. Cortázar, espousing the notion that 'poetry and prose reciprocally empower each other, ' constructs hybrid 'prosems' or 'peoms' that contend with love and loss, nationalistic ambivalence, literary theory, and memory. Something of a lovable crank, he declares listening to headphones 'stupid and alienating' and a 'psychological prison' in a lyrical essay ostensibly in favor of them, and heaps inexplicable scorn on knitters and Notre Dame Cathedral. Cortázar pithily laments his own squareness--'I accept this destiny of ironed shirts'--and the aging process, during which time is 'a truckload of rocks/ dumped on your back, puking/ its insufferable weight.' A political expatriate to Paris, Cortázar footnotes one poem praising Argentina with an ominous implication of state-sanctioned murder, while elsewhere he fondly recalls 'wisps of smoke/ gracefully streaming from the peanut vendors' carts' in the Plaza de Mayo. Cortázar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortázar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"When City Lights was preparing to publish the first edition of Julio Cortázar's poetry in English in 1997 (it's number fifty-three in the Pocket Poets series), [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti wanted to produce a lean volume. In doing so, he cut the essay 'For Listening Through Headphones, ' which Cortázar begins by mourning the 'pre-echo' on some records that mars 'the brief night of the ears as they get ready for the fresh irruption of sound.' It's funny that an essay that more than once uses the play of light and darkness to illuminate sound would be omitted from a book titled Save Twilight. But this month, City Lights is reissuing the volume, now heftier, thanks in part to the restoration of 'For Listening' (and other poems that were left out from the original). In addition to being mesmerizing and utterly gorgeous ('now the needle / runs through the former silence and focuses it / in a black plush ... a phosphene silence'), the essay links the experience of hearing music through headphones to poetry's innate intimacy: 'How not to think, then, that somehow poetry is a word heard through invisible headphones as soon as the poem begins to work its spell.'"--Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

"Cortázar, an Argentine writer who worked mostly across the postwar years, is best known as a novelist. But his mind was, in certain ways, most purely a poet's, and this collection, beautifully translated by Stephen Kessler, shows the range of his talent. The edition--small and irresistible, the kind you want to pocket and read out on the grass somewhere--is bilingual, with Spanish on the left page and English on the right, and Kessler does us the favor of retaining some of Cortázar's weird, wandering little essays, including 'For Listening Through Headphones, ' his oblique study of poetic intimacy. In lyric, Cortázar works best in the second person; some of my favorite pieces are love poems. 'Everything I'd want from you / is finally so little / because finally it's everything, ' he writes. 'Let the pleasure we invent together / be one more sign of freedom.'"--Nathan Heller, The New Yorker

"Originally published in 1997, this new, plump little volume (which would only fit in the largest pocket of your cargo pants) is an excellent introduction to [Julio Cortázar's