YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE

You’ve Heard This One Before brings the understated yet piercing irony of Spain’s award-winning “wild poet born in a bar” to English readers for the first time. Iribarren learned to write poetry while serving drinks and wandering the streets of his native San Sebastián. Influenced by the so-called “dirty realists” of the US (Carver, Bukowski, Fante), he forged his own extreme poetic minimalism. A humble, humorous, and razor-sharp flâneur, “subservient to no one / and never up for sale,” Iribarren weaves the “small incidents” of life into his “tiny epic” whose simple language conceals a consummate art. This selected volume of Iribarren’s work in English translation samples from thirteen of his fifteen published collections.

Karmelo Iribarren is one of Spain’s most remarkable poets writing today. Streetcorners, cafés, bars, and bedrooms are the sites of many of his poems, written in an accessible language that invites the reader in, as though conversing with the poet over a glass of wine in the back corner of a bar—“old words, worn by time … weekday words.” Beneath the irony of his poetry, one perceives a tenderness, sensitivity, and deep humanity. We are fortunate to have John Sesgo’s masterful translations of Iribarren’s poems in this bilingual edition. —Anthony L. Geist

Iribarren’s poems are brilliantly small and observational, loaded with aphoristic wit, startlingly apt metaphors, and the most charming pessimism. They accumulate such that Iribarren’s work ultimately becomes a sustained articulation of the limits of human experience—in which love is an “old / neon sign / whose letters / still blink on,” in which so “many are heading home / quite simply / because there’s nowhere else / to go,” in which we can’t help but wonder at how life can “be / only this.” I’m grateful to John Sesgo for bringing Iribarren’s work into English so deftly, and I can only hope You’ve Heard This One Before manages to have a real impact on American poetry. —Wayne Miller

Iribarren’s English-language debut reads like bar talk at its most musical, with the mundane moments of life—a plastic bag in the wind, the water under a bridge—made utterly surprising. As a career bartender, Iribarren is always at the party but apart from it. There’s a loneliness in this book that is especially sad since what a good bartender does is make people less lonely. —Harper Galvin

Poems that are fierce, bitter, disillusioned, tender, unpretentious, true. —El Mundo

“Iribarren is a flâneur, not of streets, but of lives: a mischievous devil who investigates, as he roams, what is happening inside each house and person’s soul.” —Luis Alberto de Cuenca