Luis Alberto Ambroggio on 'An Exercise in the Darkness'

 

Luis Alberto Ambroggio on An Exercise in the Darkness

 

In An Exercise in the Darkness, Xánath Caraza delights our senses with magical playfulness, astonishing us throughout the 66 duplicating poems in the collection. Skillfully selecting key words from every paragraph of her prose poetry, which are then marked in boldface, the author extracts a brief poem that is not a Haiku, Tanka or Haibun, but an original poetic offshoot that fills us with effervescent amazement. In her prologue, Elizabeth Lara writes: “The writer’s ink, imbued with a throbbing life force, is barely contained by the white spaces that surround it.” In this way, we travel through the three sections of this fascinating collection that reflect three of the author’s geographic spaces: Fertile Land (Mexico); The Great Plains (Kansas) and Random Punctuation (Vermont). With the rebellious ingenuity of her verses and style in An Exercise in the Darkness, Xánath Caraza, one of the most prominent voices in contemporary poetry from Mexico and the US, conjures the imagination of readers who share in the mystery of a world that oscillates between darkness and light. This triple duality is stylistically innovative with prose and its poetic echo, the ekphrastic expression of the illustrations and also the bilingual version created in an original fashion with the participation of translator Sandra Kingery and the interpretative diversity of nine of her students, as she explains in her introduction. Xánath Caraza’s collection An Exercise in the Darkness is a heart-shaped treasure chest that safeguards and reveals emotions with the preciosity of metaphors, images, and personifications. It captivates us, inhabiting nature and the “blood of the earth.”

 

Luis Alberto Ambroggio

North American Academy of the Spanish Language