Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)

What is breath for? What is archive? Why write a poem, instead of... something else?

Theophylline is a work of poetry motivated by asthma, seeking poetry’s futurity in a queer and female heritage. Moure crosses a border to engage the poetry of three American modernists―Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké―as a translator might enter work to translate it. But what if that work is already in English?

I looked for women who had made and were formed by
migrations, and who were in some way marked ‘qustionably’
by the socius, and I examined what I could of the forms and
shapes of their migrations―

ERÍN MOURE is a poet and translator (primarily of Galician and French poetry into English) who welcomes texts that are unconventional or difficult because she loves and needs them. Among other honours, she is a two-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award (in poetry and translation), a winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Nelson Ball Prize, a co-recipient of the QWF Spoken Word Prize, a three-time finalist for a Best Translated Book Award in poetry, and a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

ELISA SAMPEDRÍN is undependable. Her presence, like that of the shoe, worries the book.