ISBN: 9781 9164051 27
Juana Adcock’s Split begins with a conversation between a woman and a snake and ends with thirteen voices affirming the vitality, difficulty and necessity of attuned communication. These poems question where we might find fulfilment, power and hope, and it turns out that’s rarely where we’ve been taught they exist. Split is at once playful, philosophical, angry, nuanced and ultimately transformative.
Split is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter, 2019, and was Highly Commended in the 2020 Forward Poetry Prizes.
Juana Adcock's Split is one of the most exciting debuts I've ever read. Formally and linguistically innovative, Adcock's poetic dialogues expand the terms of lyric address to interrogate language itself. Here we find both violence and desire at the level of the word, upending the rootedness of power with tremendous skill and captivating authority. – Sandeep Parmar
Juana Adcock’s dazzling collection is a lyrical exploration of the intersection between Mexican myths, cultural displacements and language in the context of personal and political interrogations. Split fiercely questions notions of translingualism, the female body and what it means to transcend history and ancestry. Her poetry moves between Mexico, Scotland and beyond, and speaks with an urgency and nuance that is unique in the Latinx poetry world. – Leo Boix
“When asked why she decided to stay here the birlin traveller responded:/ it’s the way people speak” “Words are such good travellers/ they pick up meanings as they go.” Two quotations from the many spinning in my head after the first dip into the gorgeous richness and muliplicity of the exhilarating territory that is Juana Adcock’s work. Doppelgangers and doubles are nothing to the possessor of the 'Seven Poet Selves'. Here is sharp specificity, humour, daring. These poems rock. They sing." – Liz Lochhead
Split by Juana Adcock (ISBN: 9781 9164051 27)
The Task of the Translator
Hold the concept
as a dear hand
learn its scars, its temperature
the parts hardened by work
the weight with which
it will lead, or be led.
One day: try
words on
one after the other
like rings;
another day: the first
ring chosen
a perfect fit:
how joyfully
the metal glints
for having found
printed on skin
by lack of sun
a band, as if the ring
had been there
all alongJuana Adcock is a Mexican-born, Scotland-based, bilingual poet and translator. Her Spanish poetry collection Manca (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2014) was named by Reforma’s distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez as one of the best poetry books published in 2014. Split is Juana’s first full collection of poems written in English.