One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Books by Women G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door crushing the cockroach and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature

Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that best corresponded to her demands as a writer. "

The Clean Shirt of It marks the first English translation of a full-length poetry title by acclaimed Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto. As translator Idra Novey writes in her introduction, "No other contemporary Brazilian poets write like Britto. At least not with such a keen sense of the relationship between form and content, or pop culture and high art." Paulo Henriques Britto has received Brazil's most prestigious prizes for literature and translation. He lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he teaches at Catholic University. Idra Novey lives in New York City. She received the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship.

In this cahier, American poet Idra Novey explores several notions of translation through two sequences of poems. In the first sequence, "Letters to C," she addresses the figure and the words of a writer she has recently translated, Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. In the second, "Regarding Marmalade, Cognates, and Visitors," Novey looks at the connections between language, translation, and the hosting of visitors, including her newborn son. Idra Novey's texts are in conversation with works by the artist Erica Baum - images of books that seem both to invite and resist attempts to read them.

In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what's next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.