LICORICE CANDIES
CECILIA PAVÓN
First Edition: 2016
Translated from Spanish to English
ISBN 978-0-578-17345-0
5.5 x 8.5 in., 198 pp.
Published by:
Scrambler Books
Sacramento, CA
Licorice Candies collects short stories and poems written during the author’s most experimental and frenzied phase. The backdrop shifts from barren plazas in Buenos Aires to basement parties in Berlin. “I wished that, by continually moving horizontally, in a straight line, my body would touch Germany…that you could reach Berlin from Buenos Aires in a second without any planes; that all the coolest cities in the world were each a continuation of the next: Lima, Buenos Aires, Berlin.” The medium through which these desires manifest is the Internet. The Internet—a ubiquitous force that becomes the notebook for the author’s poetry: typo-ridden love letters; the grammarless confessions of a polyglot; a geography that bends to the author’s will, making everything closer, more intimate.
REVIEWS
"Hallucinations, dreams, and quotidian things intermingle in Cecilia Pavón’s Licorice Candies. Ordinary insomnia and intimate anecdotes lace these pages with potent doses of enigmatic confections like stains, like stars, like syrup: lost puzzles and stolen glimpses for the reader to savor.… The narrator(s) of these pages pulsate in German nightclubs; they muse on the non-existence of the social sciences in a dystopian future present; they hawk ambient electronica for stadium listening parties; they work their hands to blood in the vegetable garden of a convent.…And yet, somehow, a vivid coherence emerges among these visions, rendered and remixed with delicacy and precision in translation by Jacob Steinberg. Flitting images and conversational tones resonate over time through the pages and across the gutter in bilingual synchronicity. Translations meld with scenes in each new REM cycle at play within the volume. If each dream is a single, the full mixtape is best played on repeat, yes, at full volume."
—Danny Snelson, author of Radios