Our Obsidian Tongues - Paperback

David Shook’s debut collection employs the city as a lens through which to explore the multiplicity of voices that inhabit it, cannibalizing a wide range of his predecessors – from the Classical Nahuatl singers of the Aztec empire to the contemporary poets of Mexico City – to scrape away the city’s grunge and reveal hidden layers of sediment and story.

This book is a medical chart, a form of diagnosis. —David Huerta

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. He has translated Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist manifesto, indigenous Mexican poetry from the Isthmus Zapotec, and oral poetry by the Burundian Batwa. He served as Translator in Residence at Britain’s Poetry Parnassus at The Southbank, in 2012. There he premiered his covertly shot documentary about Equatorial Guinean poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang. Shook lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the poet and pastor Syd Shook, where he edits Molossus and Phoneme Books.

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