About the Book
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.
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About the Author :
Elena Salamanca is a writer and historian from El Salvador currently living in Mexico. She has published La familia o el olvido (2017 and 2018), Peces en la boca (2013 and 2011), Landsmoder (2022 and 2012), and Último viernes (2008). Her most recent books, Claudia Lars: La niña que vio una salamandra (2020) and Prudencia Ayala: La niña con pájaros en la cabeza (2021) are the first two volumes of her "Colección Siemprevivas" series dedicated to the stories of more than 40 women who were born or lived in El Salvador between the 18th and 20th centuries. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, and Swedish. Since 2009, she has combined literature, performance, memory, and politics in public space. She is a doctorate candidate in History from the Colegio de México, and her thesis investigates the relationships between Central American unity, citizenship, and exile. She earned her master's in History from El Colegio de México (2016) and the Universidad de Huelva, Spain (2013). Ryan Greene is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He's a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS [www.fiikbooks.org] and a housemate at no.good.home [www.nogoodhome.com]. His translations include work by Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. In 2021, he was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his work with Yaxkin Melchy, and his translation of Elena Salamanca's Landsmoder won the Stories Award for Poetry put on by Not a Cult. Since 2018, he has facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.
Review :
MONSTERS 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.
Nicole Cecilia Delgado, Poet, Translator, Book Artist, and Cultural Worker
Enter MONSTERS MAYBE as you would a sacred cave. Traversing eons of prehistory and prejudice in the region known today as El Salvador, the eye hovers over geological, historical, and personal time, from life emerging first as colonies of bacteria followed by flora of mind-blowing structures. Here, the vegetal lifeforce sings of resilience, of woman, of blood, of being(s) grounded and uprooted. In Elena Salamanca's verdant picture-show and in Ryan Greene's vibrant translation, reverence is as thick as the air of an ancient forest pulsing with undefeatable life. How lucky we readers are, to breathe this air, to witness this bilingual language-blooming.
Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta, Translator and Bookseller
