Description:
Through poems about femicide, immigration, displaced peoples, and the inhospitable climates that remain, Verónica González Arredondo explores the arid desert ecosystems of Mexico with superb side-by-side translations by Allison A. deFreese.
Brief description: Verónica González Arredondo (Guanajuato, Mexico) holds a PhD in Arts from the Universidad de Guanajuato and a Master's in Philosophy from the Universidad de Zacatecas. She has received several prestigious Latin American literary awards, including Mexico's National Ramón López Velarde Prize in Poetry/Premio Nacional de Poesía "Ramón López Velarde," for her book of poems Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not That Body (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2015) as well as the Dolores Castro Prize /Premio Dolores Castro, an annual prize awarded to a woman writing exceptional and socially conscious work in Spanish, for her book Verde Fuegos de Espíritus/Green Fires of the Spirits (Ayuntamiento de Aguascalientes, 2014). Voracidad, grito y belleza animal/Voraciousness, Screams and Animal Beauty, a book of essays, was also published by Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in 2014. Verónica González Arredondo's books of verse have previously been translated into, and published in, French and Portuguese. From 2017-2018 she held a FONCA fellowship for younger artists through the Fondo Nacional para la Culturas y las Artes/National Fund for Arts and Culture. "Al aire el cuerpo duele"/"The Body Pains the Wind," a section in Verónica González Arredondo's award-winning second book Ese cuerpo no soy/I Am Not that Body references a line from Dolores Castro's verse.
Review Quotes:
"I Am Not That Body ... bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico. ... sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, [I Am Not That Body] is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico."
- Edwin Alanís-García, author of Galería, writing for Asymptote Journal's Translation Tuesday Blog
"...rarely has a poetry collection been dedicated to femicide in its many ugly shapes facing migrant women in their journey to reach the US-Mexico border. Through haunting imagery and gripping lines, these poems render visible and audible the victims of femicide, invisibilized, silenced, but never erased from collective memory."
- Ghada Mourad, translator of Omar Youssef Souleimane's The Last Syrian