Some more good news

I just got the news that Undressing the Night, the bilingual edition of poems by Francisco Santos translated by yours truly, has been printed at last, that it looks beautiful, and that advance copies have been mailed and should be at my doors within a week or two. Copies can be ordered at boolisbook@yahoo.com (Price as yet to be determined.)

At first, we had been aiming for a Spring release, but as with any project there were lots of unforseen delays. Norberto Salinas, editor of the Costa Rican press Editorial Lunes, has been as careful and conscientious as he could be under the circumstances-- that is, that he was publishing several other books while coordinating el festival de Poesía de Costa Rica, an international festival wherein 15 of his house's titles were being launched. More than a hundred emails, ten generations of PDF files of the text and seven generations of the cover had to be sent back and forth through the summer before all the details were ironed out...not to mention plenty of phone calls. (So much easier it would have been had we been able to get together personally by his computer to design the content and layout -- doing things long distance and in Spanish posed special challenges...) This became my little "summer project" while teaching 30 hours a week in an ESL immersion program. As with all my creative productions, this one seemed to take forever being born, with plenty of obstacles along the way, along the classical lines of man against nature, man against technology, man against himself. One week we were in suspense because San Salvador, where Norberto was attending a conference, was hit by a hurricane that knocked out communications and delayed his return by a few days. What a relief when we got that email saying he was safe! Everything was ready to go in late August when Norberto's printer suffered a major mishap, cutting off a finger on his cutter. (The only fortunate thing for us perhaps was that it wasn't on our job). The poor fellow just got back to work a few days ago, so here we are. I'm sure many of you out there can tell similar stories. In any case... here we are, here we are. (I'm still waiting for my copies though...so it won't feel quite real yet until I have them in my hands!)