Mud Songs Elsehere Book I was selected by Patricia Killelea for the 2026 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize.
Mud Songs Elsehere Book I, by polyglot poet, literary translator, and Fernando Pessoa scholar Patricio Ferrari, is a lyrical and archival journey through languages, inheritances, and crossings. This visionary collection by Ferrari reveals a multilingual poetics of arrival, attentive to histories of migration, loss, and renewal. Book I of the Elsehere multilingual trilogy celebrates the living body of language, teeming with its many voices carried across generations. Buenos Aires, a protagonist, speaks in tongues—from castellano ("last of the Italian dialects") and lunfardo ("argot porteño") to its "talismanic / barrios // filled with ventriloquist hands." A home of many places and an "immigrant" unto itself, the city preserves words and gestures once spoken in homes and experienced still on the streets, in tango lyrics, or in a mate gourd passed hand-to-hand. In one of the book's quiet ars poeticas, the neighborhood tailor remarks '"Como se camina se baila,'" you say / As one walks so one dances," which reverberates throughout Mud Songs—churning "fluencies of barro-mud" with an "anchor / mouth." Here, language becomes a meeting place of selves. May we remember, as Ferrari does, that we are "perpetually arriving." We are not only "the ocean's offspring," we can make "a harbor out of any tongue."
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, editor, and scholar. He holds degrees from the Sorbonne, Brown University, and the University of Lisbon, and has published more than twenty books as translator and editor, including volumes by Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, as well as The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, all published by New Directions.
"'Self is a long arrival,' writes Patricio Ferrari in this ode to language's boundless plasticity and the loving entangoment of his own and his native Buenos Aires's many languages. While he was writing the translingual poems in the collection, he was also committed to finding the English register in which to voice Fernando Pessoa's multifarious oeuvre as well as Alejandra Pizarnik's French-language poems. In the delirious process of completing these extraordinary feats, he proved he too contained multitudes. This is only the first book of a trilogy—I marvel at what might come next." — Mónica de la Torre
"Patricio Ferrari is a poet of language, form, meaning and music. His Mud Songs sing of our origins, our materiality, our musical aspirations, and our bewilderments. 'Lighthouse of we' he pronounces at the end of Terra, and notably this 'we' is not just the living 'Accents are / waves / curling / from the past' we hear, and the songs of the dead sing through our tongues. Here is a master of translation, languages, inventive forms and webbed meanings. This collection is an invitation, but not into clarity; rather, it is a welcome to the muddy ground of our evolving languages and the common—and uncommon—land between us." — Pádraig Ó Tuama
"There is a tidal strength to Mud Songs, an inexorable motion and accrual of words and meaning like a sedimentary layering; history is a physical phenomenon: mud, mudder, madre, matter, mother, mother-tongue, the material of Ferrari's linguistic birth in the muddy language mess of the Argentinian Delta. More than just a personal excavation of etymological (and familial) roots, Mud Songs is a revelation of history as language, and language as geography, of maps and mate: a polyglot son's ever-shifting shanty about a life, a swell and ebb and about loss and change; it is a romance of Romance languages, a journal of journeying, and altogether a gathering anthematic love song to love and song." — Martin Corless-Smith
"Patricio Ferrari's remarkable art of translanguaging—long normalized in Indian multilingual life—reflects a non-essentialist understanding of language and opens a frontier in poetry. To read him is to bend your ear 'into confluence,' a slipstream of creative, interactive linguistic registers. Like the Delphic Oracle, Ferrari's Mudonna speaks in a soft excitation of currents, an interstitial song. The poems are scored, sometimes literally, for deep emotional tenderness; returning themes concern maternity, motherland, mother tongue. And yet in Mud Songs, Ferrari finds a lyric voice for poetry beyond the authority of any nation, dictionary, or academy. Applying his plural linguistic competence to a novel poetics, Ferrari doesn't simply code switch. Instead, he draws from one integrated linguistic repertoire in which permeable boundaries between languages allow for an abundance of meanings—sonic, visual, semantic—to arise through context and resonance. This beautiful book speaks to you in tongues." — Forrest Gander
"Given that he literally grew up in a language school, it's not surprising that Ferrari is fluent in several languages, nor that he puts language, in all its fluidity and ubiquity, at the center of this beautiful hybrid text. Playing one tongue off another, he creates a music that resonates beyond any single linguistic system and emphasizes the eternal metamorphosis at the heart of all language—slipping from mouth to mouth across continents and eras, the act of human expression rises again, triumphant." — Cole Swensen
"Este excelente y originalísimo libro de Patricio Ferrari revela un profundo dominio de las tres lenguas que utiliza en él —italiano, inglés y castellano—. No es sólo que se maneje perfectamente bien en ellas, sino que juega con las palabras, transformándolas de manera profundamente creativa y capturando así nuevas e insospechadas significaciones. Este deslumbrante dominio de las lenguas atrapa al lector, quien, además, se descubre jugando él mismo con la dimensión lingüística tal como lo hace el autor. Esto significa que al lector se le confiere un papel activo que no es fácil encontrar en la poesía actual. Pero este manejo brillante de las lenguas no es sólo un rasgo predominante de este libro, sino que a través de él se alcanza una forma sumamente personal de hablar sobre los diferentes temas que abarca el poemario." — Cristina Piña
