The debut English language poetry collection by noted Mexican author Isabel Zapata, A WHALE IS A COUNTRY explores humanity's relationship to the natural world through a multitude of poignant angles.
The animals that populate the poems of Isabel Zapata's A WHALE IS A COUNTRY invent us: they lead us into the forest of our own humanity. Their songs, growls, and silences speak in a language we took for lost, but now we hear it anew: in tender, crystalline, quadrupedal poems that invite us to recover our connection to the kindred lives with which we share this world.
An extinct marsupial is a ghost. A tortoise is an ancient spirit wandering an island at the end of the world. A stuffed polar bear is the modest proof of a terrible defeat. From the microscopic waters where the hardy tardigrades make their home, to the ardent imagination that forged the impossible jackalope, to the nature preserve in Woodside, California, where Koko the gorilla learned sign language, every ecosystem appears before us as a site of discovery and communion.
Zapata's poems often delight, then unsettle; again and again, she peels back the layers of what human beings take for granted about our experiences, surroundings, and relationships with both. In the end, they urge us into a state of witness bound up with humility, outrage, devotion, and care.
"I have been anticipating Robin Myers's translation of A WHALE IS A COUNTRY (Una ballena es un país) by Isabel Zapata. These razor-sharp poems are rendered with clarity and require the reader to sit up, to pay attention to the world around us. Not only is the poet 'interested in the language of animals, ' she presents for us our precarious entanglements with the environment as destroyer gods and sensitive custodians. It's clear to the poet: the choice is ours. She asks 'What does it say about us that we murder what we want to keep?' as a rhetorical device to prove our fickle commitment to this planet, its animals, and ultimately to ourselves. This is a book of ecopoetry, rendered bilingually, that I will return to again and again."--Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria
Poetry. Essay, Hybrid. Film, Nature. Women's Studies.
