"Cecilia Pavón’s poems are pure happiness, although they aren’t always about happiness, or about happy things. Living and working in Buenos Aires, she writes poems that are at once subtle, direct, and uncanny. Sometimes emotion erupts, but she keeps her eyes moving, scan-ning the room and the sidewalks, the faces of friends. Poetically, she seems a close cousin of Dorothea Lasky. Her poems in A Hotel with My Name (Scrambler Books) are like beach balls: primary colors in bright plastic strips, driven by winds and always aloft. Pavón founded the legendary Belleza y Felicidad storefront cultural center, small press, and gallery with her friend and sometime collaborator Fernanda Laguna in 1999, and these poems, written between 1998 and 2001, reflect that era’s intense alternative scene of artists and intellectuals marooned by the economic crisis, without losing their singularity. The book’s translator, Jacob Steinberg, recalls hearing Pavón read in Buenos Aires when he was nineteen. As he writes in his introduction, “Something in my soul stirred I felt less alone.” Steinberg’s done a fabulous job of rendering her simple and feminine—not feminized—Spanish into compulsively readable English. The poems draw you in. As her friend the writer César Aira has noted, Pavón’s triumph is one of creating “a dream, just like reality.”
-Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, from ARTFORUM December 2015
"I owe more than I can express to Cecilia. Her vision of the world and the brave way in which she can open up and share that vision—revealing both vulnerabilities and moments of selfishness, extreme doubts followed by the strength to take extreme risks—have taught me what it means to be human. What it means to incorporate the experiences of life in a meaningful way and grow from them. What it means to be hurt and heal and return to the world and try again. What it means to fall in love."
—from the Translator's Preface by Jacob Steinberg
Cecilia Pavón has been a defining figure of the Argentine cultural scene since the 1990s. She is the author of over 10 volumes of poetry, 3 short story collections, and an anthology of blog posts, and was co-founder of the legendary art gallery and publishing press Belleza y Felicidad. She currently lives in Buenos Aires.
Jacob Steinberg is the author of the poetry collections Magulladón (2012), Ante ti se arrodilla mi silencio (2013), and Soy la bestia que adoro (2023). In 2014, Scrambler Books published Before You Kneels My Silence, a selection of his works in English. He has translated Cecilia Pavón, Mario Bellatin, and CAConrad, among others. Since 2020 he is co-director of Triana Editorial, an independent publishing house in Buenos Aires dedicated to contemporary poetry and translation. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
