Reasons for Writing Poetry is the first collection of verse to appear in English from the internationally acclaimed Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos (Lima, 1960). This selection of works, spanning nearly thirty years of poetic output, was carefully chosen for this edition by the author in collaboration with his long-time translator. Chirinos is well known in his native country and the author of sixteen books of poetry in addition to volumes of academic criticism, essays, translations, and children’s books. A member of Peru’s 80’s Generation, his work has been widely anthologized throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Several of Chirinos’s poems have appeared in literary journals in English translation.


The present volume charts the growth of a poet whose fondness for masks is manifest in the frequently dialogic, even polyvocal discourse of his work. Chirinos’s poetry is marked by a wry tone and simple lyric eloquence. Accessible, ironic, and always entertaining, the poems in Reasons for Writing Poetry treat time and again Chirinos’s favourite subjects and themes: the return to childhood, the vagaries of memory, the alternative reality of dream, a fascination with animals, the utility of seeing and hearing, the writer’s place in poetic tradition, and the never-ending search for originality through innovative expression.

Translated by: G.J. Racz