Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His debut poetry collection, Threat Come Close, was the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and his chapbook, St. Trigger, won the Button Poetry Prize. He is the translator of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s 1967 collection, The Great Zoo, selected for the Phoenix Poet Series by University of Chicago Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Poetry Magazine. From Metro-Detroit, Coleman has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. He is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
Photo Credit: Marcus Jackson
Judges’ Citation
The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén is one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Originally published in Spanish in 1967 and translated by Aaron Coleman with a subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition remains a relevant commentary on our times.
The Great Zoo by Nicolás Guillén is one of the masterpieces of Latin American poetry. Originally published in Spanish in 1967 and translated by Aaron Coleman with a subtle understanding of the contexts of colonial oppression and exoticism, this bilingual edition remains a relevant commentary on our times. The Great Zoo seeks to integrate history, society, nature, and dreams into the territories of this singular park. It is not only an atypical bestiary of nonsensical and imprecatory zoography, not only a humorous book of fables with strange morals, but also a surprising essay of social criticism that mocks the taxonomic and classificatory pride of man pretending to gather, in cages, the living complexity of nature. The zoo’s fauna comprises ideas, emotions, phenomena, anthropomorphized animals, and men who are animals; the descriptions of the species are masterpieces of suggestion, working on our imagination with great force. The book, entertaining and moving, is simply beautiful.
Selected poems
by Aaron Coleman
It’s melting helplessly,
the North Star.
Ten million, or even more,
tons every day
(ice, cold light, gas)
waste away from the frame
of this immense animal.
You will see,
if you look just over there,
how our team of conservators
keeps putting puffs of cotton
in the empty spaces.
But this won’t be enough,
and within four centuries at most,
navigators will have
to blindly feel their way across the sea.
What responsibility!
The animal that costs us most,
and the one we can conserve the least.
Copyright © 2024, Aaron Coleman translated from the Spanish written by Nicolás Guillén, The Great Zoo, University of Chicago Press
The North Star
the Spanish written by Nicolás Guillén