Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat - by Maria Paz Guerrero (Paperback)

About the Book

"From one of Colombia's most innovative modern poets, Marâia Paz Guerrero's poetry collection, Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, is filled with sinuous verses on the human experience told with cadence akin to salsa musicians like Hâector Lavoe. In Marâia Paz Guerrero's Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, unnamed bodies are cut open in search of disease, legs buckle and collapse under pressure, and a blind cat stalks its way through the collection, bumping into unseen objects as it travels. Marâia Paz Guerrero's poetry collection is both experimental and lyrical, forcing readers to fall into its eerily clipped rhythm"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

From one of Colombia's most innovative contemporary poets, Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat is filled with sinuous verses on the human experience told with a cadence usually found only in music.

In María Paz Guerrero's Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, unnamed bodies are cut open in search of disease, legs buckle and collapse under pressure, and a blind cat stalks its way through the collection, bumping into unseen objects along the way. María Paz Guerrero's poetry collection is both experimental and lyrical, drawing readers into its eerily clipped, ever beguiling rhythm.

Review Quotes

"In this book, María Paz Guerrero claws at language to show us its animal core. In Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, words become bodies: bodies that stick out their tongues, that collide with one another, that long to be touched. They are also sick bodies, straining to speak, but even so--or perhaps because of it--they sing. María Paz's poetry, like the best salsa playlists, always revives us." --Eliana Hernandez Pachon

"These poems aren't just a collection of inspired moments, but the result of a linguistic exploration that generates meaning, of bodies in motion." --Juliana Muñoz Toro, El Espectador

"Guerrero's poems reveal a universe where the intellectual exercise of reading other poets creates a flow of images - which, at the same time, sheds light on how those readings created poems in the first place." --Gloria Susana Esquivel

"It takes great courage to speak about sickness; despite being synonymous, between grief and compassion there is a vast silence in which books like Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat bring comfort." --Francisco José Casado Pérez, Vallejo & Co.

About the Author

María Paz Guerrero is the author of the poetry collection Dios también es una perra (Cajón de Sastre) and the essay "El dolor de estar vivoen Los poemas póstumos de César Vallejo" (Universidad de la Andes), and she is the editor of the poetry anthology La Generación sin Nombre (Universidad Central). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Pájaros de sombra: Diecisiete poetas colombianas, 1989-1964 (Vaso Roto) and Moradas interiores: Cuatro poetas colombianas (Universidad Javeriana). Her second collection, Los Analfabetas, will be published in 2020 by La Jaula publications. She received her master's degree in Comparative Literature from The New Sorbonne University, Paris. She is currently a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the Universidad Central in Bogotá.

Robin Myers is a poet and translator. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. Recent translations include the National Book Award winner We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara; Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza (co-translated with Sarah Booker); Bariloche, Love Training, and A Father Is Born by Andrés Neuman; and The Law of Conservation by Mariana Spada, among many other works of poetry and prose.