Pablo GarcÍa Casado’s "The Outskirts" brings to mind Blaise Cendrars’s work from Travel Notes, and particularly a poem like "São Paulo" (first line: "I adore this city"). In both poems, with their lack of punctuation and fierce abutment of words, irony is most in danger of being lost in the translation. In line three of García Casado’s poem, for example, the irony of "civil service exams" would immediately resonate for Spanish readers who, in all probability, would have taken these notoriously difficult exams—whose scheduling and scoring are both irregular—themselves, or else listened to the horror stories of someone who has.