Destruction of the Lover by Luis Panini

You neither create nor destroy me, you only transform me. In this exciting addition to the Pleaides Press Series in Translation, Luis Panini’s Destruction of the Lover is a story about love—erotic, tragicomic, devastating love—and its singular capability to redefine who we think we are. Lawrence Schimel’s pitch-perfect translation of this taut series of prose poems captures the distinct vibrancy of Panini’s voice on the page while bringing into vivid relief the nuanced experience of his speaker who is, as Rigoberto González puts it in his introduction, “book-smart but still discovering the shape of his queerness.” Following in the literary tradition of Dante and Petrarch yet wholly modern, Panini reminds us that the path to the beloved unfailingly leads back to the self, but a self made new through suffering, a self transformed.