Inri

Description

A harrowing meditation on tyranny, torture, and freedom by one of Chile's most celebrated contemporary poets. In 2001, the president of Chile publicly acknowledged that many of the bodies of the people who had disappeard under the dictatorship of Gemral Augusto Pinochet would never be recovered. The victims had been flown up in planes and, after having their eyes gouged out, pushed out over the mountains and deserts of Chile or the Pacific Ocean. Raol Zurita's INRI (these are of course the letters nailed to the cross on which Jesus was crucified, identifying him as Jesus Christ, King of the Jews) is a visionary response to this atrocity, an agonized and deeply moving elegy for the dead in which the whole of Chile, with its snow covered cordilleras, its fields of wildflowers, its empty spaces and the sparkling sea beyond, is simultaneously transformed into the grave of its lost children and their living and risen body. This incantatory, prophetic work--prophetic in the same way that Jeremiah and Isaiah are prophetic, which is to say unapologetically political--is one of the great poems of our new century.

Raol Zurita is one of Latin America's most celebrated and controversial poets. After Augusto Pinochet's 1973 military coup, his poetry sought to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and the corruption of the Spanish language. During Pinochet's dictatorship, Zurita published a trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise, and The New Life), bulldozed poems in the Chilean desert, and helped to form the art collective "Colectivo de Accion de Art." Zurita was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature, a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation, in 2000. Essayist, poet, and translator William Rowe is an Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of several books on Latin American Poetry.

"Zurita creates a wonderful body of work that marks a point of no return for the poetics of the previous generation and for which he stands out among his generation...." -Roberto Bolano "In brutal opposition to the pouring of libations into the earth for future good harvests, Pinochet's regime harvests humans and dumps them into the holes of the earth: the oceans and volcanoes. These deaths cannot be understood and this poem is not for understanding. Zurita's INRI asks without asking: what forms may avenge our avalanche of unjust deaths." -Helen Dimos "These poems arise into the English language as spirits of dissidence attesting to fascist violence whilst daring beauty." -Verity Spott