ABOUT THIS BOOK

Raúl Zurita has long been recognized as one of the most important poetic voices in the Americas today. His compelling rhythms combine epic and lyric tones, public and most intimate themes, grief and joy. This bilingual volume of selected works is the first of its kind in any language, representing the remarkable range of this extraordinary poet. Zurita's work confronts the cataclysm of the Pinochet coup with a powerful urgency matched by his extraordinary craftsmanship and imaginative vision. In his attempt to address the atrocities that indelibly mark our continents, he makes manifest the common history of the Americas through the history and literature of Chile.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Raul Zurita is one of the most celebrated poets from Latin America. His poetry has chronicled the violence against the Chilean people since the 1973 coup that replaced Salvador Allende's democratic government with a military dictatorship by Augusto Pinochet. During the dictatorship, Zurita wrote prolifically, composed poems in the air over New York, and bulldozed poems of resistance in the Chilean desert. Zurita was awarded the Chilean National Prize of Literature and a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Anna Deeny Morales works on topics related to Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, poetry and philosophy, comparative North/South literatures and translation. Deeny has translated Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009) and Dreams for Kurosawa (arrow as aarow press, 2012), both by Raúl Zurita.

REVIEWS

"His poems are bone, river, spirit. They are weaved in the sky and in the desert. His words give us eyes to see the blue, the white, the endless hues of beige and ocher—the colors of the desert he returns to. . . He refines distance as well as the sea. He is the revolution of language. Lyrical and epic. Mythical and mesmerizing." —Prairie Schooner

“There isn’t a more important contemporary writer than Raúl Zurita. And through her insistent attention to diction and syntax, Anna Deeny creates an English poetry as abrupt, heuristic, sweeping, and finally redemptive as the Spanish; to wit, she delivers Zurita’s genius.” —Forrest Gander, author of Eye Against Eye and Torn Awake— -

"Raúl Zurita is one of the essential poets of the twenty-first century, and we are fortunate to have these fiercely beautiful translations." —Robert Hass, author of The Apple Treesat Olema and What Light Can Do— -

"In her powerful and useful introduction to these poems, Anna Morales reminds us of the specific historical events that generated Zurita's poetry. These need to be known. ‘To be disappeared’ is to be taken away to another piece of the earth, a particular place, and hidden there. In Chile Pinochet and a population gone blood-mad did this. 'To disappear' is to die into God. Zurita studies this difference. His marvelous poetry, as such, is a work of mystery.” —Fanny Howe, author of Come and See and Second Childhood— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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