Description:
The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth, by Gisela Heffes, is a poetry collection about absence, memory and the fragile shelters we build as we move through displacement. Through intimate poems, its verses capture fleeting, everyday details, holding them in language before they vanish.
Written as delicate testaments against extinction, the title evokes the living loss around which the poems unfold. The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth thus reveals how what has ceased to exist can nonetheless generate presence. These intimate poems move between the domestic and the planetary, weaving together environmental crisis and political violence. Invoking multiple forms of extinction, their imagery gathers around a home that is provisional and plural, eliciting from that intimate yet transitory space a delicate balance between vulnerability and resilient strength.
Brief description: Gisela Heffes (Buenos Aires,1971) is a writer, essayist, and professorof Latin American literatureand culture at Johns HopkinsUniversity. As a pioneering scholarin ecocriticism and the environmentalhumanities, she has alsopublished extensively on wastepolitics, urban utopias, migration, motherhood, and Judeo-Argentineliterature, as well as volumes ofpoetry, fiction, and essays thathave been translated into multiplelanguages. Most recently, Nuestroshuesos sobre la tierra received FirstHonorable Mention in the LatinAmerican Voices category of the iiPremio Internacional Literal (2025).She is also working on the essay collectionPétalos de piedra, which willbe published in 2026 with Mantis(Bolivia).