The Book of Conjurations
The author will be joined in conversation by Katherine Rucker
Irizelma Robles’s fifth poetry collection–the first to be translated into English–transforms poet, reader and language through its conjurations. Among these pages, all forms of material existence are transmuted: barbwire, rain, soul, sugarcane, scream become the ingredients for a poetic alchemy. These poems draw inspiration from the periodic table, precious and semi-precious stones, Puerto Rican flora and fauna, and memories of the Caribbean and Latin America. Robles creates an alternate cosmogony that neither rejects nor unquestioningly accepts Western medical discourse. These poems are written to conjure another life out of this one, a way forward despite and with the poet’s neurodivergence, sadness, depression, and anxiety.
Translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera says, “Translating Irizelma Robles’s El libro de los conjuros and transmuting it into The Book of Conjurations has been one of the most satisfying translation projects I have undertaken in the last few years. The resonances, cadences, allusions, images, and outright beauty in these poems are only surpassed by Irizelma herself, my friend and a poet I greatly admire.”
Irizelma Robles is a Rochester-based poet and essayist who was born in Puerto Rico in 1973. Her poetry collections include De pez ida (2003), Isla Mujeres (2009), Agave azul (2013), Alumbre (2018), El libro de los conjuros (2018), El templo de Samye (2020). In 2020, Stony Brook University awarded her with the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Award for her book Lacustre. The Book of Conjurations (Sundial House) was translated by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera in 2024. Now she is working on the book El parque de la pagoda (Park of the Pagoda), an exercise on Zen Poetry.
Katherine Rucker is a book enthusiast, writer, and translator based in Rochester, New York. She holds a master’s in literary translation from the University of Rochester’s MALTS program. Her published translation work includes the graphic novel “A Chance” (Graphic Mundi) and a short story in “Bogotá 39: New Voices from Latin America” (Hay Festival/UNESCO). She worked as a freelance translator until 2023, and is now a teacher of English as a Second Language and Spanish in the Rochester City School District.
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