New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña by Cecilia Vicuna and translated by Rosa Alcala

This is poetry from Chile.

New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña by Cecilia Vicuna translated by Rosa Alcala is published by Kelsey Street Press. This is a Selected originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780932716873E12.

The New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, translated with Rosa Alcalá, offers a wide doorway into one of Chile’s most important contemporary poets and artists. Vicuña’s work moves through Indigenous memory, ecological grief, political violence, erotic presence, textile thinking, and the fragile materials of language itself. Her poems often feel less like fixed objects than offerings, knots, threads, or temporary shelters built from breath. Alcalá’s involvement helps carry the bilingual and cross-material nature of the work into English while preserving its sense of ritual and risk. This is a selected volume, but it does not feel like a museum case. It feels alive with movement. Vicuña teaches the reader to see poetry as something made by hand, voice, body, and earth together. The result is a book of witness, play, mourning, and luminous repair.

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.