Against Professional Secrets

Roof Books, long known for publishing living writers, just couldn’ t resist treating its readers to this previously untranslated prose work of Cé sar Vallejo in Against Professional Secrets. These poems brilliantly translated by Joseph Mulligan attack the received wisdom of poets in favor of a completely lived existence. Collected from a cardboard box in Vallejo’ s archive, this volume represents a series of prose poems that were selected by the author for publication along with material that he was in the process of choosing from before he died including the additions and deletions he proposes. Not only does this work expose the poetic process of the writer that Jerome Rothenberg describes as “ the greatest of the great South American poets,” but it also introduces the reader to a poet capable of rewriting himself: "A time of thoroughfare contained my family.”