“A slender book, a slender set of poems to carry such weight. Readers will be amazed at how much passionate love, hate, joy, grief, loneliness, and anger inhabits these love poems to a single man over a period of years, he in exile, she trapped in Montevideo. Invoking ‘a life burning to be pierced,’ each of these brief poems is a gem, resembling the diamonds and diamond chips a refugee might sew into the hem of a coat, for survival purposes in crossing boundaries and borders—gems hard and luminous from within. Vilariño is a thrilling discovery for me; I am grateful to her remarkable translator, Jesse Lee Kercheval, as well. If we had more of Sappho, she might sound like Vilariño.”—Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After
"Thanks to the tireless and remarkable translation work of Jesse Lee Kercheval, English-language readers can learn about this classic of Latin American poetry, Poemas de Amor. With a simple structure, rhythm, and poetic language, the Uruguayan Idea Vilariño makes one of the most complex approaches to the subject. These texts radically defy the conventions of courtly love and romanticism, and redefine love through the recognition of its strangeness, transience, and loss, as the awareness of the other." —Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
“Stands as a testament to both the necessity and the impossibility of love.” —Latin American Literature Today