]]>For in these poems, love is a reverberation that transforms and subverts, a mode of both individual and collective identification, a process rather than a state or destination. Interwoven with poetry and the figure of César Vallejo, Aunque me extinga becomes a song against pain and abandonment, a collection deeply rooted in the present—a social context that demands our attention and calls for more generous ways of understanding those who leave their homelands behind.
“This book is a hand that pushes us toward life. As the author reminds us: ‘writing is a way to stave off death,’ to build a new nest, a refuge of beauty—one that is not devoid of conflict, but free from violence. That is why, in these pages, there is a voice that moves from the wounds of migration to the creative core of love. Farewell and desire drive language toward the borders of geography, of poetry, and of the body—the true map of hips, feet, and mysteries. With the sensitivity of a great poet, Sofía Crespo Madrid reminds us that writing can also be a home, a land where we can reimagine ourselves and love more intensely.” (Mónica Ojeda, translated from Spanish by Archivo Venezuela)
Source: Candaya
]]>This is the shipwreck Enza García Arreaza has given us in Cosmonauta, weaving it through poems that are also postcards sent from an astronomical distance. A childhood both raw and palpable, family life with its procession of small miracles and horrors, migration with no final destination, love filled with subterranean dangers—these poems thrust us harshly through these scenes, these vignettes, floating, like someone daring to navigate a remote place governed by forces we barely understand. That is to say, they make us repeat what García Arreaza has already done herself: casting her voice into outer space, where a fierce vegetation awaits us all, where animals with deep-set eyes and long fangs dwell.
This is a book unafraid to cross strange fields of magnetism and gravity, one that dares to leave behind the realm of the known. And all of us who have left home are, in the end, cosmonauts." (Adalber Salas Hernández, translated from Spanish by Archivo Venezuela).
Enza García Arreaza (Puerto La Cruz, 1987).
Narrator and poet. She won the VII Cuento Contigo: Nuevas Voces Literarias Literary Prize from Casa de América in Madrid (Editorial Siruela, 2004). In 2007, she won the V Contest for Unpublished Authors with her short story collection Cállate poco a poco (Monte Ávila Editores, 2008). In 2009, she received the III National University Literature Prize, awarded by the Permanent Commission of University Culture Directors in Venezuela, for her short story collection El bosque de los abedules (Equinoccio, 2010 / Sudaquia, 2016).
She is also the author of the short story collection Plegarias para un zorro (bid & co, 2012 / Paraíso Perdido, 2019) and the poetry collection El animal intacto (Ediciones Isla de Libros, 2015).
In 2017, she participated as a resident writer in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and was invited by City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. From 2018 to 2020, she was a resident of the International Writers Project at Brown University. (Source, translated from Spanish by Archivo Venezuela).
]]>“I can’t remember a debut collection so startling and fresh, so uncompromising and passionate. Leonora Simonovis’s powerful, confident voice runs through each and every one of these poems like a lifeline in defiance of injustice and oppression. She writes about Venezuela, exile, and family with such rich detail and nuance that we are swept away into her struggle to maintain a precarious balance in all of her worlds. This book is a sharp reminder that the personal is also—and always—political. She is always tuned in to the heart, a heart we can believe in and trust.”
—Jim Daniels
“In Leonora Simonovis's beautiful book, Study of the Raft, family history is mixed with feminist history, and what it means to be a citizen. The death of Abuela's child intersects with what it means to be a woman, dodging "the bullets of others' desire," and the speaker's sense of alienation in her own country. All of these tensions accumulate into an important geometry of American life. Simonovis's poems are plainspoken and powerful, gentle and fierce. An impressive debut, these poems are a gift to contemporary American poetry.”
—Victoria Chang
"In Study of the Raft, Leonora Simonovis’s poems weave the outer world of a failed political revolution in her native country, Venezuela, with an inner journey into the memories of migration and exile, of a home long gone, and of family relations, especially among womxn. The collection explores the consequences of colonization, starting with “Maps,” a poem that speaks of loss and uprootedness, recalling a time when indigenous lands were stolen and occupied, where stories were lost as new languages and beliefs were imposed on people. The politics of the present are also the politics of the past, not just in the Venezuelan context, but in many other Latin American and Caribbean countries. It is the reality of all indigenous people. Simonovis’s poems question the capacity of language to represent the complexity of lived experience, especially when it involves living from more than one language and culture. These poems wrestle with questions of life and death, of what remains after what and whom we know are no longer with us, and how we, as humans, constantly change and adjust in the face of uncertainty." Source: University Press of Colorado.
Leonora Simonovis reads two poems from Study of the Raft for the Colorado Review's Latinx Reading Series.
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Review and reading of Restituir la lengua in Voces de la literatura.
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Far from nihilism, what Acosta’s resolute words ultimately seek to convey is less a vision of our current fears and more the urgency with which we must take on the challenge of rescuing, from the ruins of the planet, our dwindling desire for a future." (Gustavo Guerrero, translated from Spanish by Archivo Venezuela)
]]>Writer, visual artist, and academic. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Latin American Literature at the University of Iowa, where she also completed an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish. She is the founder and editor of the digital magazine Digo.palabra.txt and the research and dissemination project #PoetasVenezolanas.
Books:
«Desacuerdo»
El rugido
ensordecedor
del mar
se interpone
entre
las dos)
yo le digo:
creo
que estamos
ahogadas
ella responde:
no
No estamos
ahogadas
yo le digo:
yacemos
a la par
en el fondo
del mar
Presentation of La mañana imaginada by Rodolfo Häsler
Interview with María Auxiliadora Álvarez by César Eduardo Carrión for MURA Revista Literaria.
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