Pixel Flesh

Poetry. Translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington. In PIXEL FLESH, superbly translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington, Agustín Fernández Mallo posits and then destabilizes hypotheses, unifying apparent opposites by revealing them as the poles of a single surface. With inexhaustible curiosity, bracing inversions of logic, and a refusal to hierarchize forms of knowledge, Fernández Mallo zooms in until what appears concrete is returned to abstraction, creating a self-reconfiguring system wherein a map is also an emptiness; algebra, a flame; heat from a circuit board, sweat; and the world, a form of disappearance. PIXEL FLESH may begin as a project of postpoetic enumeration, but its poems are permeated with irrepressible feeling and lyricism, suggesting the inseparability of logic and intuition and drawing us to the place where 'a human being is something more than a bit of saliva.'--Lizzie Davis

Fernández Mallo's verse captures our 21st-century pixelated lives--full of brusque kaleidoscopic juxtaposition--and yet remains remarkably moving, poignant, even timeless. PIXEL FLESH is a deep dive into love, loneliness, space, and time. In Ludington's beautiful English translation, Fernández Mallo's slim collection crackles with urgency. This is poetry for lovers, poetry for mathematicians and astronomers, poetry for your grandmother. Read it now.--Lisa Dillman

Fernández Mallo occupies something of a similar position in the Spanish literary sphere as David Foster Wallace in terms of their shared insistence on the naturalization of the screen as an interface for the reception of reality.--Jorge Carrión