Celebrating _Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin_ (FlowerSong Press)

 Celebrating _Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin_ (FlowerSong Press)

 

I’m excited to invite our lectores de La Bloga to a reading of my book Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin (FlowerSong Press, 2020) on Friday, October 1, at 7 p.m. CST on Facebook and Zoom.  This event is organized by Edward Vidaurre, editor of FlowerSong Press.  Please join us by going to the FlowerSong Press Facebook page el Viernes 1 de octubre.  We are celebrating the nomination of Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin as a finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Award as Best Book of Bilingual Poetry of the International Latino Book Awards 2021. Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin was translated by Sandra Kingery y sus estudiantes. Music performance by Flor Lizbeth Cruz. Espero y nos puedan acompañar. ¡Que la poesía nos salve!

 Xánath Caraza’s Corta la piel/It Pierces the Skin is a remarkable collection of prose poems in which we see the conjuring poet fearless enough to take us through personal, political and geographical terrains.  The poems are muscular meditations on rage, powerlessness, love, and ultimately the sanctity/sanity of poetry.  The title fits into the visceral world filled with the paradoxes of beauty and violence that Caraza is famous for: the fierce loneliness of the New York city trains over the Hudson, Violeta (the Salvadoran speaker, the figure who is observed, the writer who is writing the poem) discerns the full moon as “Icy, splendid, silvery white.”  In one of her most poignant political poems, we encounter the disappeared forty-third student from Ayotzinapa who sees “The stars in the heavens were shining like never before” while his mouth is “buzzing with flies.” Another poem, “Our Sons and Daughters,” captures the heartbreaking evil of separating children from their parents at the border.  Water becomes an ever increasing trope throughout as we move from New York to Lisbon to Athens, an element essential for survival as poetry itself, the poet’s “liquid words” joining the river of memory.  They “flow on placid waters.  They sway back and forth in her mouth.”  Xánath Caraza is one of the most courageous Latina poets writing today. The “silent voice of dawn gallops” towards something framed in hope, and Caraza’s poems leave you light headed, sorrowful, yet empowered.

 

—Helena Maria Viramontes

Author of Their Dogs Came with Them

Xánath Caraza’s Corta la piel is a very powerful piece of writing. These 62 interconnected short prose poems move the reader with images encompassing everything from the personal struggles of the protagonists to current events to the conquest of the Americas. The poignancy of contemplating a world that is, as Violeta murmurs in the first story, “so screwed up” is leavened with shimmering glimpses of the beauty of the natural world and a paean to the power of writing, all expressed in texts that sparkle with the energy and brio and authenticity found in all of Xánath Caraza’s writing.

The two protagonists in these stories afford us dual levels of reality: at the primary level, we have texts in roman script which focus on Violeta the writer. That first Violeta creates the fiction within the fiction, the italicized stories written by Violeta about a fictional character who is also named Violeta. These nesting stories emphasize the creative process as our primary protagonist invents a secondary protagonist who shares many of her experiences and concerns about the world.  Both suffer loneliness and a failed relationship, both revel in the beauty of nature (the moon, water, fog, birdsong), both are drawn inexorably back to memories of their troubled past when they hear the whistles of trains, and both celebrate the power of the written word. The dual nature of the two Violetas is most readily apparent in “Loss,” the only story that includes both roman and italic script: “The racist groups were organizing, and the weight of their negative energy was felt more strongly every day. It was heartbreaking, a threat. There’s nothing worse than ignorance, Violeta wrote, but she was wrong, there was something even worse…”. Subsequent references to the first Violeta’s writing process are more subtle as they remain in italic script: “It’s very easy to project our fears onto others and then blame them, Violeta continued writing”.

 —Sandra Kingery

Lycoming College

 

The first text, which also gives us the title of the collection, is an indictment of the brutality of the war in El Salvador, since the protagonist remembers that when she was a child she had to flee abruptly—by train—from the Salvadoran soldiers who suddenly appeared near her house with machine guns. That thought leads to another, current and present: the cancelation of the Temporary Protected Status or TPS for Salvadorans. Both reflections are sparked by the sound of a train and by a small cut that the protagonist suffers in her kitchen. In this way, a connection is made between Violeta’s private experience, in other words, the microcosm of the violence she has experienced personally, and the macrocosm of the violence in El Salvador and the anti-immigration politics carried out by the U.S. government. As with other texts in this collection, nature, here embodied in the song of the woodpecker that Violeta hears in the garden and in the trees that she sees from her kitchen window, helps her find peace in a foreign land: “She was soothed by the chirping sounds coming from the thick bushes.”  The social theme, constant in Caraza’s writing, is also found in “43,” a story that alludes to the disappearance of the 43 normalistas in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in September 2014, where the narrative voice imagines itself as one of the victims who lie beneath the sun with no tomb and no justice: “In the darkness of the night, I felt warm blood trickling toward my eyes. . . ‘I’m from Ayotzinapa’. . . I am the 43.”

—María Esther Quintana Millamoto

Texas A&M University

 

This is a book of beautiful, poetic images of loneliness, grief and emptiness.  The persona of Violeta tells of a violent childhood of abandonment and impossible love via her travels in New York, Portugal, and Greece.   For Violeta, only ink remains; only ink is indelible.  Translator Sandra Kingery and her team of students have produced smooth, faithful translations that carry all of the sorrow of Caraza’s originals.

 —Don Cellini

poet / translator

Piedra poemas / Stone Poems