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Flesh wounds, flies, flowers, and freedom. Blanca Varela's MATERIAL EXERCISES is a declaration of divine oblivion vis-à-vis a violent mysticism. Here, no soul ascends to commune with a vengeful deity: salvation is not achieved from bodily punishment but found in the poetic possibility that emerges from the corporeal tension between tactility and spirituality, night and day, the cogito and the empirical, where language is both god's first gift to humankind and the cadaver in which the sacred father decays with his mortal creation. Translated by Carlos Lara, Material Exercises is a display of the vatic exorcism of the unconscious and a phenomenological investigation of space and intersubjective incarnation.
"When I read Blanca Varela, I feel like she's pinning my flesh to a table and coaxing a soul out of me. Material Exercises is an axe that cleaves meat from spirit, matter from memory, metaphysics from the world of things; yet it is also the gesture--celebratory and terrifying--of fusing them back together. Carlos Lara's translation is pitch-perfect. Poet of a kindred violence, he just might be Varela's perfect translator."--Kit Schluter, author of Pierrot's Fingernails
Poetry. Translation. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies.
