From the Founding of the Country : Cristina Pérez Díaz

Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, Cristina Pérez Díaz's first book of poems deliriously dreams with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. Taking root in the discordant influences of Walt Whitman and Puerto Rican poet Manuel Ramos Otero, and in the exposed cracks of the nation-building project, From the Founding of a Country is simultaneously utopian dream and post-colonial critique. The long poem tells a fragmentary narrative of two lovers—one languid and liquid, the other sharp as exclamation points—who are also two nations bound in a horrendous love. Whitman's athletics finds itself dismembered in the impossibility of the colonial situation. The non-optimistic voice takes over to renounce the hopes of tamable landscapes and sings the erasure of the tropes of foundational histories.

Pérez Díaz's debut is a transatlantic book, unafraid of the posterity awaiting one of the finest contemporary poets. —MARA PASTOR

Pérez Díaz's dazzling poem stretches the borders between languages and histories, unearthing a chasm that challenges the colonial forces behind its eruption. —ISABEL SOBRAL CAMPOS

In poems that fruit and wither, fade and flower, moving gracefully between the bareness of spare and nominal English to the verdant verb-centric dynamism of Spanish, From the Founding of a Country is a history of how the one nourishes the other and the other destroys the one, and so it begins, over and over again. —CHLOE GARCÍA ROBERTS

Channeling literary giants like Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and Manuel Ramos Otero, Pérez Díaz has written a stunning love letter to her country, Puerto Rico, a place full of contradictions and mirages. —MARGARITA PINTADO BURGOS

Each verse is a limb, an autonomous whole, separated from the following as by an anatomical knife, as if it were the articulation of a body to be shared after a sacrifice. The miracle, spreading joy or sadness, sometimes irony, is born in the scar of the incision, on the wound of union. —PHOEBE GIANNISI