Böcker av Karla Marrufo

Poetry collection by Karla Marrufo.Translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese.Poet's bio: Karla Marrufo is author of eight books including novels, poetry collections, chapbooks, plays, and works of literary criticism. Her work has won prestigious awards including: Mexico's National Wilberto Cantón Award in Playwriting, the XVI José Díaz Bolio Poetry Prize, and the National Dolores Castro Prize for Women. She also received a fellowship from the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y al Desarrollo Artístico en Yucatán (the PECDA, or Program for the Expansion and Development of Creativity and the Arts in the Yucatán), which resulted in the publication of her book Mérida lo invisible / Mérida the Invisible (Consejo Editorial de la Secretaría de la Cultura y las Artes de Yucatán). Her recent books of verse include La Dulzura de los naufragios / The Sweetness of Shipwrecks (2020) and Si Mérida tuviera puentes / If Mérida Had Bridges (2021).Translator's bio: Allison A. deFreese is a poet and literary translator whose books of verse include Nurdles and Other Poems (2022) and The Night with James Dean and Other Prose Poems (winner of Cathexis Northwest Press' 2022 chapbook competition). Her translations of Karla Marrufo's work also appear in Another Chicago Magazine, New England Review, SAND Journal Berlin's 10th Anniversary Issue, and other publications. She translated Marrufo's novel Flame Trees in May (Dalkey Archive Press and Deep Vellum Publishing, May, 2023).

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.