My Lai by Carmen Berenguer and translated by Liz Henry

This is poetry from Chile.

My Lai by Carmen Berenguer translated by Liz Henry is published by Cardboard House Press. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2017.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781945720048E12.

Carmen Berenguer’s My Lai, translated by Liz Henry, takes its title from atrocity and refuses the reader any easy distance from historical violence. Berenguer is a major Chilean poet whose work often engages dictatorship, feminism, urban life, and political memory through formally restless language. The invocation of My Lai links Vietnam, Chile, empire, massacre, and the recurring machinery of state violence. Henry’s translation carries the urgency of a book that is not simply about a past event, but about how violence circulates through language and public consciousness. I would read this as poetry of witness and disturbance. It is not interested in making brutality legible in a comforting way. Instead, it asks what the poem can do when history itself has become almost unbearable to name. My Lai is necessary because it does not let memory become passive.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.