You've Heard This One Before: Selected Poems

You've Heard This One Before brings the understated yet piercing irony of Spain's award-winning 'wild poet born in a bar' to English readers for the first time. Iribarren learned to write poetry while serving drinks and wandering the streets of his native San Sebastian. Influenced by the so-called 'dirty realists' of the US (Carver, Bukowski, Fante), he forged his own extreme poetic minimalism. A humble, humorous, and razor-sharp flaneur, 'subservient to no one / and never up for sale,' Iribarren weaves the 'small incidents' of life into his 'tiny epic' whose simple language conceals a consummate art. You've Heard This One Before, the first selected volume of Iribarren's work in English translation, samples from thirteen of his fifteen published collections.