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Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology

Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology
Chloe Garcia Roberts
co•im•press, 2024

Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology by Chloe Garcia Roberts presents an astonishing collection of poem-essays that seek to reveal firm footholds and guiding threads to lead readers—and the author herself—though the treacherous and often ill-lit forests of liminality. In essays covering language worship, translation as sacrament, the allusion of memory, and more, Garcia Roberts creates a cumulative argument across ten works of intensifying emotional registers: language is not only a medium for communicating knowledge but is itself a font of understanding. Churning with boundless heart, thought, and wild desire to plumb the depths of self and spirit in search of geneses, these essays develop their form through the interplay of memory, etymology, religion, and translation. Collectively, Fire Eater offers a beacon for spiritual seekers and linguaphiles alike: a divination with the dictionary that is at once an invocation to unravel the complex knots of our in betweenness and an antidote to our despair.”

For sale at Asterism Books

Chloe Garcia Roberts
Written by
Chloe Garcia Roberts

Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet, essayist, and translator from the Chinese and Spanish. She has published a book of poetry, The Reveal (Noemi Press), and her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes (New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published by New York Review Books. She is the recipient of a NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of the novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis (University of Arizona Press, 2025). Her next book, Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology, will be published in the fall of 2024, and her essays, poems, and translations have been published in such journals as BOMB, A Public Space, and Yale Review. She lives in Boston and works as deputy editor of Harvard Review and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.

Chloe Garcia Roberts Written by Chloe Garcia Roberts