The Book of Explanations - Paperback

by Tedi López Mills (Author), Robin Myers (Translator)

From one of Mexico's premier poets, the award-winning Tedi López Mills, a hybrid, genre-defying book of essays following the unusual and surprising complexities of everyday life.

Through thirteen essays, Tedi López Mills explores the minutiae that at first glance go unnoticed. In "Improper Nouns," she explores the history and destiny of an uncomfortable name, asking whether the way we name what surrounds us affects the fabric of its essence. In "How Time Passes, In Consciousness and Outside," one's individual experience of time splits from how it passes outside us. The following essays allude to conscience, pain, private histories, dreams, wisdom, and the most difficult of memories that build one's own identity. Throughout, López Mills traces the trail of her own history, journeying into her own conscience and the mysteries of existence.

Author Biography

Tedi López Mills is one of Mexico's foremost poets writing today. Born in Mexico City in 1959, she studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and literature at the Sorbonne. She is the author of ten books of and two essay collections, several of which have received national literary prizes. An English edition of Against the Current, in translation by Wendy Burke, was published by Phoneme Media in 2016. López Mills sets the pace for her contemporaries with work that is linguistically inventive and philosophically rigorous. She invokes the classics, the troubadours, and the pastoral tradition with an underlying skepticism about language, landscape, and causality that keeps her work current, engaging the eye while troubling the "I." She lives in Mexico City, Mexico.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based translator and poet. Book-length translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books, Fall 2021), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter, 2020), Animals at the End of the World (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Lyric Poetry Is Dead by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg (Cardboard House Press, 2018). Other work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Common, the Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, World Literature Today, Asymptote, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She was among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets) and is an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.