WAKING IN THE DESERT by Zaira Pacheco
FORTHCOMING
Waking in the Desert by Zaira Pacheco. Translated by Lauren Shapiro.
Eulalia Books: forthcoming 2024.
A vast, spare work set in a timeless landscape of rock and sand, it can be read as a kind of origin story; through constricting the language and the lens of each poem, Pacheco seeks to create an expansive exploration of what lies underneath such limited modes of naming. Cracks and fissures, pockets of shadows, and ancient water flows alternately illuminate and obscure the traces of humans; heat becomes not just the heat of the all-consuming desert but the body’s intense, overwhelming desire to live. In this landscape, humans are animals, almost reptilian, and their flesh is like the flesh of their prey. They are distinguished perhaps most clearly in their tendency toward solitude, as well as in their inclination to name and thus understand their world. Mirar, observar, ver—as readers we watch as the narrator bears witness to an almost prehistoric narrative, deceptive in its simplicity, profound in its implications. This idea of testimony, of both experiencing and using language to reinforce what one has experienced, is everywhere present, as is the emphasis on original experience—the first fire, the first absence. We may not have been put on this world to name it, but it is through this naming that we both communicate and understand, in our daily lives and through this very book that seeks to explore its own poetic impulse.
Biography
Born in 1987 in San Juan, Zaira Pacheco holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Barcelona and is a professor of language and literature in the Spanish Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She is the author of three books of poetry: Ciutat (2016), Despertar en el Sahara (2019) and La melancolía de Durero (2022).
Poems from the book:
“To Be a Reptile,” by Zaira Pacheco, Modern Poetry in Translation, November 2023.
“Nocturne,” by Zaira Pacheco, Modern Poetry in Translation, November 2023.