Description
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by John Pluecker.
What is a body when it's lost?
ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ is the story of the search for a body, a specific body, one of the thousands of bodies lost in the war against drug trafficking that began more than a decade ago in Mexico. A woman, Antígona González, attempts to narrate the disappearance of Tadeo, her elder brother. She searches for her brother among the dead. San Fernando, Tamaulipas, appears to be the end of her search.
But Sara Uribe's book is also a palimpsest that rewrites and cowrites the juxtapositions and interweavings of all the other Antigones. From the foundational Antigone of Sophocles passing through Griselda Gambaro's Antígona furiosa, Leopoldo Marechal's Antígona Vélez, María Zambrano's La tumba de Antígona all the way to Antigone's Claim by Judith Butler. And this book's writing machine includes testimonies from family members of the victims and fragments and fragments from news stories that provide accounts of all these absences, all the bodies that we are missing.
"This brilliant and moving book revives the story of Antigone to confront the horrifying violence shrouded within the present landscape—Antigone, a solitary figure before the law, facing certain death, who invokes a way of resistance at once textual and political. Sophocles' play resonates throughout this act of poetic testimony and fierce interpretation, making emphatic graphic marks precisely where there is no trace of loss."—Judith Butler
"Sara Uribe's ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ reads as if written by the Emily Dickinson of Tamaulipas in response to the loss and violence occurring all around her—it is that intimate, honest, unaffected, intelligent, urgent, innovative, spare, and beautiful. I am so happy that this landmark of contemporary Mexican literature is now available in the United States."—Francisco Goldman
"As the families of so many disappeared throughout Mexico, Sara Uribe's ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ roams a convulsed land looking for the body of Tadeo, her brother. As urgent as it is delicate, ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ summons the dead and brings them to our tables, for the day we cease sharing memory and language with them, we ourselves will become loss, vanished sign, oblivion."—Cristina Rivera-Garza
Author Bio
Born in 1978 in Querétaro, Sara Uribe has lived in Tamaulipas since 1996. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy; she received the Carmen Alardín Regional Poetry Prize in 2004, the Tijuana National Poetry Prize in 2005 and the Clemente López Trujillo Poetry Prize in 2005. She has been a grantee of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (2006-2007) and of the Programa de Estímulos a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico (2010 & 2013). She has published Lo que no imaginas (2005), Palabras más palabras menos (2006), Nunca quise detener el tiempo (2008), Goliat (2009) and Siam (2012). Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Peru, Spain, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Author City: TAMAULIPAS MEX
John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co- founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production. His texts have appeared in journals in the US and Mexico, including The Volta, Mandorla, Aufgabe, eleven eleven, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant, and Fence. He has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including ANTÍGONA GONZÁLEZ (Les Figues Press, 2016), Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press, 2012) and Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His most recent chapbooks are Killing Current (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), Ioyaiene (Handmade for Fresh Arts Houston- based Community Supported Art Program, 2014). His book of poetry, FORD OVER was published by Noemi Press in 2016.
Author City: HOUSTON, TX USA