Alicia Bisso
translated by Heather Cleary

I never liked poetry. My self-imposed task of learning to read it began with a strange discovery. One afternoon, a traffic jam brought me to a stop in front of what seemed to be a small bookstore. I was barely able to make out what the sign hanging from the iron door said. I-N-E-S-T-A-B-L-E. Unstable. I went back because of the name. As soon as I set foot inside, I knew I had found my place. I’m drawn to small spaces where I’m not overwhelmed by titles and authors, and where the salespeople don’t throw themselves at me like darts. When I’m in a bookstore, I like to feel invisible. The owner of La Inestable is always reading and seems not to pay attention to anything else, so I’m able to take all the time I need to let the poetry grow on me. It doesn’t take long. I skim the covers of the foreign volumes. The books occupy all sorts of spaces and are stacked on different levels like in some kind of labyrinth. I read the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Gertrude Stein for the first time in the comfort of the old armchair in the corner. Each seems like a little discovery, something revealed only to me. I sometimes think that on the day I stepped across the threshold and into that store, poetry did the same with me.

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Librería La Inestable. Calle Porta 185 “B” / Miraflores / Lima, Perú

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Image: Alicia Bisso

Alicia Bisso is a writer and a journalist. She published a collection of short stories, Algunas fotos tuyas, and has a piece in Matadoras, an anthology of Peruvian women writers. She is the author of El Comercio’s relationships blog “Busco Novio” and contributes to a number of local and international publications.

Heather Cleary has published translations and literary criticism with Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and Music & Literature, among other publications. She was awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant in 2005 for her work with the poetry of Oliverio Girondo, and her translation of Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. More recently, her translations of Chejfec’s The Dark, nominated for ALTA’s National Translation Award, and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a pamphlet of Girondo’s poetry (New Directions 2014) have made their way into bookstores. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University.