Ellen Baxt

Analfabeto Ellen Baxt

Poetry. "Tender Buttons meets Two Serious Ladies: in this beautiful debut, Ellen Baxt deftly and musically portrays the manifold opportunities for disorientation that obtain only when one is dwelling, for the first time, in a foreign tongue. Tragicomically blue, her ravishing linguistic experiment has the enigmatic power of a Josef Sudek photo; she lifts the postcard and the primer to the new, crypto-nostalgic heights"--Wayne Koestenbaum. ANALFABETO/AN ALPHABET was written in Recife, Brazil, and Brooklyn, New York. Part dictionary, part travel diary, and part historical record, it crosses genre boundaries narrating shifts in identity-cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call "home".