Cosmonauta
Creator: Enza García Arreaza
Title: Cosmonauta
Publisher: Fundación La Poeteca
Date: 2020
Language: Spanish
Description:
"Every cosmonaut is, at heart, a castaway. It is enough to imagine that vast expanse we cowardly call outer space—a vastness that resists both our gaze and our imagination. And in the middle of it, place a human body, covered by a second skin as thick as it is cumbersome, breathing only by the grace of a long umbilical cord.
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 In 2007, she won the V Contest for Unpublished Authors with her short story collection Cállate poco a poco (Monte Ávila Editores, 2008).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).
Subject: Literature, poetry, Venezuela, Enza García Arreaza
Type: Text
Audio
Format: Printed book, Audiobook
Rights: External reference
Documented by: Archivo Venezuela
Relation: Review by Ricardo Montiel for Latin American Literature Today.
Cosmonauta by Enza García Arreaza, read by the author (SoundCloud).
Cosmonauta by Enza García Arreaza, read by the author (YouTube).
Collection: Poetry
Tags: Enza García Arreaza, Literature, poetry, Venezuela
Citation: Enza García Arreaza, Cosmonauta, Fundación La Poeteca, 2020, accessed September 22, 2026, https://archivovenezuela.com/en/items/show/93