Kneeling Before Corn: Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa (biodiversity in small spaces)

Politics & Social Sciences

Salamanca, Elena

Anastario, Mike

Hawkins, Elizabeth

Social Sciences

University of Arizona Press

Landsmoder

Arts & Photography

Not a Cult

Elena Salamanca's TAL VEZ MONSTRUOS Fragmentos de [INCOGNITA FLORA CUSCATLANICA] / MONSTERS MAYBE Fragments from [INCOGNITA FLORA CUSCATLANICA] is an excerpt from a book-length poem that explores the intersection between ecology, colonial violence, personal memory, family-ancestral knowledge, and place. Written from a historian's eye for research and detail, Salamanca weaves poetic language to explore colonial practices that led to ecological devastations in El Salvador communities and across South America. Through this exploration, the author uplifts the fragility of wildflowers and transforms their survival as vessels of environmental memory. TAL VEZ MONSTRUOS / MONSTERS MAYBE is a poetic revelation of wonder and possibilities, of metiers that might have existed in complex forms before the time of wars and colonization, masterfully translated by Ryan Greene. MONSTER MAYBE, more bestiary than herbarium, rescues the native flowers of Central America from extinction, extraction, and oblivion. Rebellious flowers that, when named, awaken fossils, make lava recede, and turn back history. Elena Salamanca, the poet, opens the way to investigate and discover from intuition and her senses that which History denies, hides, and forgets. The poem destroys the notion of the flower as fragile nature and unleashes the drive for life contained in the seed [medicinal, revolutionary] since before colonial processes and scientific documentation. Resistant, silent witnesses to the passage of time, wildflowers, rather than going unnoticed, germinate powerfully in the poem. Poetry. History. Languages. Central America.

Tal Vez Monstruos / Monsters Maybe

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Mouthfeel Press

Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. Translated by Alexandra Lytton Regalado. A "delicate tracery" weaving between poems and short stories, the sixteen pieces that compose FAMILY OR OBLIVION are what Elena Salamanca defines as "filigrees." This "polished and piercing" collection holds multitudes of women: girls, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, saints, brides, and widows--women who starve themselves, who gorge themselves, women who bury or are buried, who cage birds and are the birds themselves, women who are full of forgetfulness, women who are so empty they levitate. These women thread needles, they unravel knots, they knit and embroider these filigrees that speak to us about life in this unnamed city, about memory and oblivion, about the longing and emptiness that hems these characters in. Though Salamanca prefers to leave the threads of her storylines untied, these filigrees, as she explains, "can be read between the lines" and like Teresa, who "continued to float until she reached the ceiling. With no possibility of descending" readers of this book will find that Salamanca's images will also linger in their imaginations for days on end.

Family or Oblivion / La familia o el olvido

United States

Kalina

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Books by Salamanca, Elena