Reviewed by Justin D Goodman
Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems
by Jeannette L. Clariond
Translated by Forrest Gander
Princeton University Press
April 2026, 176 pages, Hardcover, ISBN-13: 978-0691280448
How fitting that the poet who wrote in her 2014 Recognition of Merit acceptance speech from the Casa Universitaria del Libro that “the book is a miracle that shelters our sole seed, which teaches us to discern true faith from false” [my translation] should have such an elegantly constructed book. Even Time Bleeds, a new anthology of award winning Mexican Poet Jeannette Lozano Clariond’s poetry translated by American poet Forrest Gander, compresses and chops over two decades of highly structured poetics into a choreographed 140 pages. Between the gnostic aphorisms of Ammonites are increasingly contemporary works whose own Gnosticism invokes Wallace Stevens and Octavio Paz. In the same vein as “one must have a mind of winter/to regard the frost,” as the former wrote in “The Snow Man,” Clariond’s reality is a self-seeking curve ringing with mortal interstices: “your heart is nothing/but the night/stirring its dream.” Spiraling, as metaphor and embodiment, the isolation of the spiral, is the collection’s center. On the invented face of “The Other” who lived and died and is resurrected, as Paz wrote, are “the wrinkles of that face./His wrinkles have no face”; for Clariond’s invented face, with the same fervor of a body negating its own being, “the river in which we see ourselves tells a lie: the light/of the word will forever remain a force of absence:/a radiance flowing past the edge of sight.” The book, full of edgeless radiance, more a body than the body.
Aptly, Even Time Bleeds begins with a portion of the “Post Canto” from Goddesses of Water. Gander says in his introductory “brief note” that he chose poems that had never been translated. This is technically true, as this version of “Post Canto” was “adapted from” the original which saw an English translation by Samantha Schnee in 2022. But here we can appreciate the brutal, bodily candor that Gander brings to his translations and the unique process of this new collection’s translation. What Schnee translates as “my body falls into the water./my body has been violated, my remains in a plastic bag,/tossed into the swamp” Gander translates “so my body sinks into the water./my body raped, its limbs lopped,/slopped into a swamp.” What reluctance Schnee expresses in passive ambiguity (“has been violated”) Gander commits to wholly (“raped”). What is functionally communicated in Schnee is transformed into the mouth’s clanking (“sinks into…limbs” “limbs lopped,” “raped/lopped/slopped/swamp”). Where Schnee’s version contained “en bolsa de plastic,” Clariond and Gander, more a collective than individual, cleave away to strengthen the impact of the violent, gendered act. This is the only poem from this collection that has been translated elsewhere, and it’s location at the front is Virgil to our Dante, the embodiment of a spiral — to begin at the violent end, the “Post Canto.” And its violence? “The fall of this goddess, sacrificial mystic, reclaims death of the body, a body that must die to be reborn into the light,” as she writes in Goddess of Water’s “antecanto.”
In some ways, despite Gander’s best efforts in the “brief note” to historicize Clariond, her work “reborn into the light” falls into “a radiance flowing past the edge of sight.” The difficulty of mystical works is the challenge of direct revelation: how tightly revelation sticks to the body. So Gander, who reminds us that Clariond’s generation “came of age marked by the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre,” can only leave us with the idea that history is relevant. A stronger note refers to her native “Chihuahua, the vast landscape [that] only exacerbated her anxiousness” – and “Mina 1004,” her least explicitly metaphysical poem, drawn as it is from her memoiristic Chihuahua Notebooks, speaks to this in its steady recital of her grandmother’s immolation, “the smoke of my grandmother’s flesh lingered in the hallway/while my aunts went on sipping bitter clots of coffee.” Casually, unspeakable violence, then a noxious quiet in the family. Yet it’s unfortunate then to not also see the appearance of Image of Absence (nee Leve Sangre), her extended meditation on the Chihuahuan landscape. If, as that works translator, Curtis Bauer, aptly writes, Clariond “understands poetry as the speech that rises from the ruins,” one wonders what map will find us there. Sometimes it’s obvious (“Mina 1004,” “Post Canto”) at other times clear for the spiritualist as with “the night/stirring its dream” in the segments of “All Before Night.” Occasionally the poetry, being the dark night of exclusively one soul, is less impactful out loud: “before the journey, Fear of the journey.” The personalism of a coffee mug.
But not only is this far and few between, it’s beside the point. Even Time Bleeds, like all of Clariond’s work, is not about the individual rocks composing the ruins, but the former architecture looming over them as an absence. “Poetry is always,” Clariond said in an interview with Maremoto Maristain, “the repetition of pain.” [my translation] No pain repeats exactly, as no piece of rubble; a repetition of differences, a spiral. We might look at the final phase of weathered rock. In perhaps the most balanced poem of the collection, “on the beach, a woman’s body/resembles a continent.” This titular “Woman of Sand” “doesn’t hesitate at the wave’s curl./it’s as though no remorse were shaking her soul.” The poet races towards her too late. “She explodes into a spray/that erases every image or memory.” “It was the sea that brought her back to life,” she affirms. Still, she “embraced the naked wave.” Nakedness, rather than disintegration, suggests denuding. Perhaps what was erased was not image or memory, but their manifestation for the poet. “It wasn’t so much her leaving, but my remorse/that unsettled me,” she admits, “I knew her body/would collapse and evanesce on the beach.” Ruins and persons can both summon up this desire to disappear into them. This is the true faith of a book. Clariond embraces the “naked wave” literally in “Naked I Waited For You,” seeking “a friction/that could only complete our abandonment—/as when swans return to the ice.” And so this book, too, is a body.
About the reviewer: Justin D Goodman (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of the New Haven Writers’ Group. Their work has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com