Foreign Music

Taut and contemplative, these poems ruminate on family, exile, love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training encapsulates Andrés Neuman’s work as a poet, spanning two decades in a single unified collection.The book is divided into three sections that complement and respond to each other.The first, “Love Training,” focuses on family, loss, relationships, desire, and a sense of anchoring in the world.The second, “Fictions of Sight,” is concerned with questions of perception, perspective, language and creativity.The third, “I Don’t Know Why,” is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions, serving as a kind of coda. While Andrés Neuman is a rightly celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid—and quite prolific—poet.Love Training is the first volume to make his sensitive, incisive poems available in English.