
Nicanor Parra
A Chilean poet and physicist born in 1914, Parra has taken the precision of scientific language and the plain speech of North American modernism and mixed it with his own sardonic humor to invent what he calls “antipoetry,” a poetry pitched against Latin American high rhetoric. New Directions has published Poems and Antipoems (1967); Emergency Poems (1972); Antipoems: New and Selected (1985); and Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great (2004). Also in English translation is Sermons and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui.