Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.This summer has been a bit more hectic as I've been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I'm excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.What have you been reading?

Thanks to Women in Translation Month, I recently learned about two fantastic contemporary poets published by Phoneme Media, which, I must say, designs some gorgeous bilingual books.Diorama, by Rocío Cerón, is super rich and multilayered. Her long poem "13 Ways To Inhabit a Corner," under the subtitle "Pinhole" speaks particularly to peering into something very closely. The looking is so careful, the sensual details so packed in, the poem demands and rewards multiple rereadings. Each of the 13 sections builds a particular atmosphere. In section I: "In the midst of a stampede, a hand rests on the arc of a kneecap. Cigar and smoke. Rosy cypress sleep." And, in section VII: "Hills, clouds, boreal forest. Woman undressing on a frozen bed. Beneath the folds of her clothing a constellation of sleet." As her translator Anna Rosenwong points out, the work is associative and hallucinatory. Other poems are more political. "DIY Instructions or the National Telluric" includes the line "civil disobedience breaks out but still the dead pile up" -- a line that made me sit up out of the intense dream state of "13 Ways to Inhabit a Corner." Diorama won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, and it's no wonder. It's the sort of beautiful, meaty book you need to settle into, chew on, and revisit.Whereas Diorama is experimental and gorgeous and challenging, Rilke Shake,by Angélica Freitas is more fun for everyone. Playful, energetic, and irreverent, Freitas takes references to poetry greats (Rilke, Keats, Gertrude Stein, etc.) and popular culture, and simply shakes. The work is sonically chewy: "I think about stravinski / and the beard of klaus kinski / and the nose of karabtchevsky / and a poem by joseph brodsky" she writes in the poem titled "what passed through the head of the violinist as he hurled toward his death against his black hair clutching his stradivarius in yesterday's great air disaster". She imagines bathing with Gertrude Stein, who "lets one loose under the water" and asks in "i can't read the cantos": "shall we free ourselves from ezra pound?" The poems do have poignant moments, such as in "sioban 4" where the speaker wonders: "does she think of me / does she also ask what happened // to the good girls of sodom, the ones who / always // kissed on the stairs / vanished in libraries / preferred to turn to salt?" I will be pushing Rilke Shake on many people. It's too good to be missed.