radio fantasmal/fantasy radio

Noa Mendoza

June 2023
Softcover, 36 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 inches
Cover artwork by Alana Zack
Printed on Risograph 
Edition of 250
12 USD

About the book

Noa Mendoza’s radio fantasmal/fantasy radio is an exercise in experimental mistranslation—between Buenos Aires and New York, Spanish and English, text and life. In their first chapbook, Mendoza questions, deepens, and obfuscates the relationship of the translator to the poet by staging a dialogue with the work of Argentine poet Violeta Sticotti. As one tries to understand the other’s grief through a close reading of their poems, the inarticulable reveals its own meta-text. This book finds poetry in the lapses of the untranslatable, meaning where language shouldn’t go. Mendoza turns a dial and tunes in to a mourning record, to a ghost slippage—a fantasy radio.

About the author

Noa Mendoza is a poet based in New York working in interdisciplinary experimental translation. Noa is the Editorial Assistant at Seven Stories Press and an A/V Manager at The Poetry Project.

Violeta Sticotti is a writer born in Buenos Aires. Her book, La Forma del Río, was published in 2020 by Trench Editorial. 

Praise

In radio fantasmal/fantasy radio, language moves like electric currents, circulating different registers of correspondence and speech, and multiplying originals into several versions at once. Noa Mendoza makes poems that mirror, cascade, and gesture toward the other—Violeta Sticotti's gorgeous poems in the Spanish included—and make me question the idea of authorship while I immerse myself in music. I'm excited to return to this chapbook over and over, to savor, among other things, the way an address can hold several types of intimacy, and the space translation opens, between what "would be sent / would arrive."
—Alexis Almeida

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