A. Ajens 
Poetry After the Invention of América 
Don’t Light the Flower

This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with ‘American’ otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition. Unlike works extending Western conceptions of writing or searching for an alleged American ethnopoetics, this book approaches literature as a Western invention and, in turn, seeks out correspondences between traditions

Table of Content

Preface; E.Moure & F.Gander Foreword; A.Moreiras Indigenous Litter-ature Drinking on the Pre-mises: The K’ulta ‘Poem’ Language, Poetry, Money Crossbreed: Examining the Braid of Fiction Aged War Overborders A Fatherless Poem? Umiri-Misturaski Flower of Extermination And/or to Live to Tell It Kissed-Into the Shared Today of Mapuche Letters On Amerindian Language and (Contemporary) Poetry The Unheard-of in Poetry Today How Can We Fail to Respond? Nobody in Chilean Poetry Sticking Your Foot in It Flat-Out: A Call for Pampa Poetry The Occasionals

About the author

ANDRÉS AJENS lives in Santiago, Chile. He completed his doctoral studies in Sociology under Alain Touraine at la École des Hautes Études in Paris, France. He is the author of numerous books, essays, and poems and he co-edits the journal
Mar con Soroche (Santiago/La Paz), and is co-founder of
Lenguandina (www.lenguandina.org) with Aymara translator and linguist Zacarías Alavi Mamani.

MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, USA. Her translations have appeared in
Conjunctions, Circumference, Cipher, Jacket, Almost Island, and other journals
, and in the forthcoming anthology
500 Years of Latin American Poetry published by Oxford University Press.