The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad
We were all to be queens
with the smell of burning in our bodies.
Now there’s nothing left for us but to be born again
like the pelican, from a strange tongue …
What if it were the elders who lived on through story, while the youngest of the family was destined to die along with a vanishing world, making way for the vision of a new self?
Throughout this award-winning collection rooted in rural Asturias, Raquel F. Menéndez inverts the generational roles of daughter, mother and great-grandmother, invoking the legendary figure of Shahrazad – the storyteller who spun tales against death – to reveal how the past is held within the present. Memory and forgetting, language and silence, home and exile collude and collide in these poems which ask how to live when so much feels already lost.
This bilingual edition presents a newly revised Asturian text by Menéndez alongside an extraordinary translation into English by Robin Munby. The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad is a remarkable testament to what survives when voices fade, and to the intimate power of poetry to keep our histories, our languages, and our selves alive.
* Releasing on World Poetry Day, March 21, all pre-orders come with a custom design 40mm enamel pin featuring the pelican on the cover of the collection. *
Praise for The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad
“A remarkable testament to all that is found in translation: a collection of poems, a matrilineage, the Asturian poetic tradition, and a reminder that every storyteller since Shahrazad keeps it all alive.” — Anton Hur
“Raquel F. Menéndez develops in this book, one of the most important in recent Asturian literature, a female genealogy of the memory and forgetting of the rural on the outskirts of Europe. High poetry rooted in the memory of a world that resists dying.” — Martín López-Vega
“El libro póstumo de Sherezade es un vuelo universal a los confines de la infancia, la lengua y el mundo. Sus contornos en la voz de Raquel F. Menéndez nos dotan de eternidad y nos elevan al misterio. Poesía de vuelo alto aferrada al origen, como una respiración, un cielo que contempla la tierra cultivada.” — Luisa Castro
“Alert to the immediacy and uncanny charm of fable and paced with a survival instinct guided by the lyric impulse, The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad is, in Michael Hartnett’s phrase, ‘a language seldom spoken, […] a child’s purse, full of useless things.’ The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad is pure delight.” — Keith Payne
Raquel F. Menéndez
Raquel F. Menéndez (Vallouta, Salas, 1993) is an Asturian poet. Her Spanish-language poetry collection Libélula was published in 2013, followed by the Asturian-language collection El llibru póstumu de Sherezade, published by Impronta in 2017. El llibru póstumu de Sherezade was awarded the Nené Losada Rico prize for Asturian poetry and chosen as the best book in Asturian in 2017 by the Tertulia Malory Jury. Her poetry often engages with issues such as the oral transmission of language and culture, the lives of women in rural communities, and intergenerational memory, as well as landscape and place.