Translated by Torin Jensen
Images by Barry Shapiro, Valerie Mejer Caso
Read by Anna Denney
Edited by Paul Cunningham
Swimmers and brides: Oriana Camarena Mejer & Raquel Peyret Grosso
This poem film was part of the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Photograph by Barry Shapiro
"While we're talking about convention, this book classifies as poetry. It throws this claim to poetry, however, immediately into question: the title informs us that it is a novel, and this novel is blue. This fact is no negligible, because if we agree that it's poetry, what we really mean is a superior sense of the term, all but forgotten nowadays: ever since Gilgamesh and the Iliad, and beyond, poetry arises from the impulse to tell a story. That is its fundamental fact. This book, by calling itself a novel, tells us just as much, but in reverse. There is no language for story but what has its origin in poetry."
— Raúl Zurita on This Blue Novel
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