Sacrificios humanos by María Fernanda Ampuero

Absorbed by nature’s otherness, Baranda seeks to inhabit the voices of the wind, of wings, night, day, and perhaps most keenly, water. The poetry of María Baranda is a haunting homage to the natural world: transcendent in scope, attentive to the particular, and acutely aware of the mystery of being. María Baranda: The New World Written, translated by Paul Hoover The collection reflects the universe that goes from everyday life to existential estrangement from the sentimental to the emotions before the world from personal geography to internalized landscapes and intimate nature from eroticism to reflections on existence from neo-baroque to the word that questions tradition. Ojos de par en par brings together poems by more than thirty women from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, South America, and Spain, each with her own particular form of expression, which translates into great poetic diversity. Luz Mary Giraldo and Martha Canfield: Ojos de par en par: Antología de poetas hispánicas Informed both by classical literature and contemporary Venezuelan politics, by twentieth-century history and high school biology class, by Twitter and the Old Testament, by the cynicism of bureaucracy and the wonder of parenthood, these poems register loss, condemn subjugation, and marvel at the music humans can make when we try to speak of it all. Others explore the body (living, dead, and in transit): where it goes, the borders it traverses, what it’s forced to leave behind.

Some address historical figures or speak in their voices. Each poem in Adalber Salas Hernández’s collection speaks to a different kind of farewell: death, estrangement, illness, dispossession, decomposition, banishment, stories forgetfully or oppressively re-written over time, the painful discrepancy between language and experience. The Science of Departures is a book of goodbyes.

Adalber Salas Hernández: The Science of Departures, translated by Robin Myers

Sacrificios humanos by María Fernanda Ampuero