Description:
In Carapace Dancer, Natalia Toledo revisits some themes from her award-winning collection The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (tr. Clare Sullivan, Phoneme, 2015).
Toledo returns to the landscape of her childhood where animals predict the future and grandmothers shape masa. Again, she questions Zapotec traditions even as she mourns their disappearance. But in these poems Toledo takes more risks: she exposes her pain and that of her people in images at once elegant and raw. Like the crab, she edges into the past, but the hard shell of experience or cynicism provides only temporary protection to the human vulnerability beneath it.
Review Quotes: Ms. Magazine, Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025
"In Carapace Dancer's trilingual presentation, the Spanish-speaking reader will notice that this is not a literal translation from the Spanish, but, as Sullivan explains, word choices were made to capture the meaning of the Isthmus Zapotec versions of the poems. In doing so, the translation preserves a sense of cultural and linguistic difference and does not fall into the trap of "domestication." The collection is fascinating, and it encourages the reader to reread all the versions of the poems." -World Literature Today