INRI

     


Raul Zurita
Translated by William Rowe

Paperback
Publication Date: 2009
Pages: 120
ISBN 10: 1-934851-04-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-934851-04-3
USD $14.95 + Shipping

INRI responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, that was neither seen nor heard, into language,  Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present.  The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the  mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, ‘the stones cry out’.

INRI is written as poetry without regular lines or metre. In the tradition of Whitman or Ginsberg’s Howl, it works with long breaths and large blocks of meaning: intensities that overrun the usual measures of speech and syntax. To read it is to experience a strange force pulsing through the language, breaking apart its usual channels, and opening unseen and unheard zones.

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About the Author, Raul Zurita

Raul ZuritaZurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the best known poets of Latin America. His work is part of a revolution in poetic language,  that began in the 1970s and sought to find new forms of expression, radically different from those of Pablo Neruda. The challenge was to confront the contemporary epoch, with its particular forms of violence, including violence done to language.

INRI is distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow, though this is not missing from the text, but seeks, rather, a new space, out of which love might be asserted as prime human reality, a space which might give birth to a different type of society.


About the Translator, William Rowe

Essayist, poet and translator, William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of several books on Latin American Poetry.


 

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Sept24The Poets’ Follies Reading Series, sponsored by Marick Press and The Oakland University Writing Center, will feature the poetry of David Young, Todd Swift and Jason Storms at 6:30PM. The reading will be followed by a question and answer session.
Wednesday September 24, 2014
6:30PM, Room 212, Kresge Library at Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309 
  
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QUOTE OF THE SEASON:
““Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better”
― Roberto Bolaño