“Katabasis’s descent into dissent gives us ‘a reason to move through the world’: Dissent from imperialist and neo-colonialist notions of Colombia and its literature, dissent from the Latin American poetry in translation canon, dissent from the translator’s invisibility. This impressive book of firsts is exactly the kind of translation work I’m most interested in. It is poetry after my own heart.”

“Lucía Estrada’s poetry does not conform to any of the preexisting models in Colombian poetry. In her quest, the poet runs away from historical referentiality and the many theaters of the self to propose a poetics of uprooting. But to pull oneself out of time and space in this writing means to settle within language as primary scene, to embrace myth and descend into an inaugural night where the word is its own and only surroundings.

Estrada’s poetry is translucent, as though writing were not about using language but traversing it. In her letting go words are emptied of unnecessary weight. Katabasis is the motion by which the poet rids herself of her anchors and embarks on a descent into the depths of night, its veil of penumbra that amounts to all things. Night—liberated, cosmic expanse of shadows—transforms into an occasion for bodies, now without memory or longing, to dock at the nowness of language, the one place of limitlessness.”

“Lucía Estrada numbers among a group of celebrated Latin American women poets who unrelentingly explore the darkest crannies of the imagination and the intellect, including Marosa di Giorgio, Reina María Rodríguez, and Blanca Varela. These probingly psychological yet profoundly lyrical poems recall the writing of Gabriela Mistral, Olga Orozco, Alejandra Pizarnik. Estrada’s poetry, which emerges from Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict, is shadowy, subaquatic, yet razor-sharp. Olivia Lott’s impressive, sophisticated translations are an event unto themselves for their lyrical luminosity and their memorable musicality: ‘Silence that trails the crash, war cry, tempest; it mixes up with mine, white, shaky. But who says I take place in the world?’ Wake up, readers, Estrada has arrived on this shore! ‘Listen, something in this scream is for you.’”