Street by Street - Entre Tanta Calle

Pablo Jofre’s Street by Street (Entre tanta calle), translated from the Spanish by Shook, includes 5 different poetry collections written between 2006 and 2020: Abecedary, You, Alien Status, Dead Skin and Berlin Manila.  

Beginning with an abecedary inspired by Flaubert's 1911 Dictionary of Received Ideas and traversing across a fragmentary travelogue recounting the poet's overland journey from Berlin to Bangkok, the books collected in Street by Street, representing Pablo Jofré's poetic work from 2006 to 2020, chronicle the lived experience of the poetic nomad, heir to the grand tradition of Chile's diaspora writers, from Mistral to Wilms Montt. Praised by Will Alexander, who writes that his "condensed verbal scale" seems to have "sprung whole cloth from un-corrupted verbal ether," in these poems Jofré relishes his sexuality, explores the confines of gender, and embraces his status as a literal alien with alternating melancholy and amusement. Translated by Shook, whose own work Jofré has translated into Spanish, these poems take on a new life in English, "euphoric from so much karaoke." Jofré's lyric rises like "sugared vocables" to the reader's ear and leaves you desperate for a nibble. 

Shook is a poet and translator based at Newt Beach in Northern California. Their most recent translations include Mario Bellatin's Beauty Salon, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's A Friend's Kitchen (with Bryar Bajalan), and Mikeas Sánchez' How to Be a Good Savage (with Wendy Call). Shook's own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Isthmus Zapotec, Kurdish, and Uyghur. Cover IIllustration by Alex Horghidan (ink and marker pen on paper, Bucharest 2022)  

Pablo Jofré (born 1974) is a Chilean poet currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Jofré was awarded the Lagar Prize by the Chilean National Contest of Literature Gabriela Mistral (La Serena) for the poetry collection Abecedario in 2009. After school in Santiago de Chile in 1992, Jofré travelled to Europe for the first time. He spent a year visiting Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal and studied German and English. Back in Chile, he studied journalism at the Diego Portales University and cultural anthropology at the University of Chile. Before obtaining his degree, he went to Barcelona in 2002 to study literary theory and comparative literature at the University of Barcelona. He also studied Catalan and French and attended literary workshops led by Leonardo Valencia and Joan-Ignasi Elias. In 2011, he was awarded Spanish nationality and emigrated to Berlin, where he currently lives.