Sea In My Bones / Mar En Los Huesos: Mar en los Huesos

The fourth collection of poetry in Juana Goergen’s rich trajectory, Mar en los huesos [Sea in my Bones] bears witness to a shared collective experience of trauma. It interweaves indigenous and African belief systems, languages, and memories to recollect the Caribbean’s ancestral past and its imagination of the future. As is true of all memory work, Sea in my Bones simultaneously speaks to the broken present: its cry against injustice rests on the hope that through its labor, “the Zemies might awaken and the Caribbean peoples’ origin be remembered.” A multilingual tour de force that slips between Spanish, Taino, and Yoruba, Goergen’s deployment of the poem as trace, as evidence, results in a cacophony of voices that bring together what life has torn apart. At the same time, the collection poses questions for all of us about the role of poetry in communities that have survived collective trauma.

About the Author :
Juana Iris Goergen (Puerto Rico). Poet and Emerita Professor at DePaul University, Chicago. Visiting Professor at InterAmerican University, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. She has published La sal de las brujas (finalist of Letras de Oro Awards, Betania 1997,) La piela medias (2003,) Las Ilusas/Dreamers (in Desarraigos, contratiempo, 2008) and Mar en los huesos (Pandora/Lobo estepario, 2017.) Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies, most recently, LatinUsa (Mexico, 2018). She was initiator and co-organizer for eleven years of the Chicago International Poetry Festival Poesía en abril. She has edited nine poetry anthologies, among them: Susurros para disipar las sombras, Rapsodia de los sentidos and Ciudad Cien en (Erato Poesía, Poesía en abril Chicago). She has been awarded contratiempo Poesía/Cultura Award, 2014 and the José Revueltas Poetry Award, 2018. At the moment she is working on two poetry collections La celda del iris/ Iris prison cell (under review) and Requiem al sueño americano: otro “Canto general”/ Requiem to the American Dream: another “Canto general.” In 2019 she was honoured by the International Poetry Festival Poesía en Abril Committee and at DePaul University with a poetry award that bears her name, the Juana Iris Goergen Poetry Award. Silvia R. Tandeciarz is Chancellor Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Vice Dean for Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at William & Mary, where she has worked since 1999. A translator, poet, and scholar in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, she has published widely on the intersections between memorial and human rights initiatives in post-dictatorship Argentina. Her work in translation includes the critical treatises Masculine/Feminine (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Insubordination of Signs (Duke University Press, 2004), both by the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, and the Poetry Book Society 2023 Translation Choice selection, Sea In My Bones (the87press, 2023), by Puerto Rican poet Juana Goergen.