The Odd Month

A collection of 29 ecopoetic vignettes that explore the complexities of politics and progress in the Global South.

Known colloquially as ＂the odd month＂ for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.

The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law--of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity--attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.

Valeria Meiller is an Argentine writer and scholar who is assistant professor of social and environmental challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the author of four collections of poetry in Spanish.

Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard as well as a cotranslator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 and Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común. With Valeria Meiller and Javiera Pérez-Salerno, she coedits Ruge el bosque, a series of regional ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. A 2022 NEA fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.