The Loose Pearl

Brimming with fury and ferocity, THE LOOSE PEARL by award-winning Chilean poet Paula Ilabaca Núñez, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, interrogates the ineffable complexities of interiority in the wake of rupture, of trauma. Through the screen of the speaker's archipelago of internal identities--the loose one, the pearl, the mare--readers are drawn into an intense and ongoing prose-poetry monologue of self-struggle, as the speaker attempts to avoid shattering completely while facing total collapse amid the relentless combine the patriarchy continually hefts--body and soul--upon women. Borzutzky's translation deftly handles the visceral and pent-up style of these prose poems, gifting readers with pages to be pored over breathlessly, out loud, and often. Ilabaca Núñez's English-language debut weaves an allegory of apathy, anger, and sexual politics, where her speaker's cherished identities get shaped and reshaped at the hands of masculine archetypes--the master, the eunuch, the king, the jeweler--until something new emerges, a polished and pointed rage that spills over and dares, at last, to voice what once was unutterable.