Aral

The Aral Sea, or Sea of Islands, was a vast lake on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan which has now all but disappeared since the Soviet government diverted the lake's two main feeder rivers in the 1960s, in order to try to irrigate the desert. This quixotic plan was a tragic failure: the local environment has been irreversibly altered. Sonia Bueno, a young Spanish poet with a complicated relation to her country (she is from the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla), travelled to the Aral Sea in the early 2010s to see one of the world's worst man-made climate disasters. Aral is her account of this journey, to a shrunken lake, a growing desert, and the human ruins that surround them. Written in an oblique, fragmentary style, these poems are a collection of impressions of an environment that is hard for the mind to grasp. Translated into English by the poet and translator James Womack, this is a collection which is unafraid to pose far-reaching and complicated questions.