OUT NOW Girasol #6: Say, Spirit by Alex Cocker.

 

Our newest book and first full-length poetry collection is Sheffield-based poet Alex Cocker’s translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, but with a catch: each sonnet is translated three times by three invented heteronyms, getting progressively queerer in the process. With its lyrical, funny, tender and intellectually playful performances of voice and translatorship, Say, Spirit probes the "trans" in translation through an investigation of language-in-motion's resistance to binary structures of thought and identity. Alongside the sonnets themselves – each presented in the original Italian and in three different Englishes – Cocker's mock-scholarly prefaces and "Footnotes from the Plato" look beyond the transgressive circulations of translation to encompass paratextual games, Michelangelo’s androgynous sculpture, and the queering of language itself. 

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