Opening Fear by Teresa Orbegoso (Paperback or Softback)

OPENING FEARpoems by Teresa Orbegoso

translated by Vania Milla / preface by Margarita Saona / foreword by Yaxkin Melchy / afterword by Silvia Goldman / illustrations by Louise Castillo

"I open a hole in my immortal cell, and I teach it how to die." Is this the voice of the poet, the voice of Teresa Orbegoso, speaking? Or are these the words of "my Cancer," the ominous character embodied in the verses of the poem? Opening Fear unravels impossible conversations of voices confronting the reader with pain, illness, death, and the wounds of history as much as those inscribed in the body. While these poems address the grave sickness experienced by the poet's body, this is not a self-involved exploration of one's own pain.

Without falling into the trap of the illness metaphors decried by Susan Sontag, Orbegoso weaves the existential threat of a potentially fatal disease with the social trauma of colonization, invoking in the same breath the consumption of Cancer, the ruins of Caral, Chichen Itza, and Teotihuacan, and the neoliberal politics of Latin American politicians of the 21st century. With lyrical dexterity, these poems guide their readers through frightening landscapes. The vitality of "those who strive to exist" does not shy away from accepting our mortality or even the sins of history. Opening the self to the horrors of violence, illness, and death, these verses manage to somehow rescue our humanity: "your heart, like breadcrumbs, will have scattered its dust in love all over our organs." Fears do not go away; they do not disappear as if by magic. But in Orbegoso's poetry, love and faith support us as we face them.

- Margarita Saona

Teresa Orbegoso (Lima, 1976) Visual artist. Poet. Cultural journalist. Social researcher. Cultural organizer. Curator. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Jaime Bausate y Mesa (Peru) and a Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina). She has a diploma in Advertising Creativity and studies in Philosophy and Musical Creation: Traditional Arts and New Technologies. She has received scholarships from the OAS, INDES IDB and Tallberg Foundation to participate in seminars and workshops for social leaders organized in Brazil, Colombia, United States and Sweden (2001-2006). She has published the poetry collections Yana wayra (Lima, Urbano Marginal, 2011), Mestiza (Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Dock, 2012), La mujer de la bestia (Maldonado, Trópico Sur, 2014), Yuyachkani (together with visual artist Zenaida Cajahuaringa, Lima, La Purita Carne, 2015), Perú (Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Poetry, 2016), Comas (Buenos Aires, Añosluz, 2018) and Abro el miedo (Lima, Hanan Harawi Editores, 2019; Argentina, Las Furias Editora, 2020). Abro el Miedo / Opening Fear, a testimonial poetry book about her experiences with cancer, was nominated for the Luces Prize from the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio, in the category "Best poetry book". In 2022 she received a grant from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture to present her books Peru and Abro el miedo at poetry festivals in Spain. Her poetry book Perú has been published in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Spain. Her work has been included in a number of academic studies in Chile, Mexico, the United States and Sweden. She has been invited to several poetry festivals in Latin America and her work has been included in various online magazines around the world. Her work has been included in anthologies of contemporary South American poetry in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru. She has been director of the Casa Cultural - Espacio de Arte Trenzando Fuerzas, and currently runs the publishing house La Primera Vértebra and hosts the program "La danza de las libélulas" for the platform La mula in Lima, Peru together with the sociologist and therapist Marco Del Mastro. As a media producer, she has created a series of diverse materials that allow for the mediation between readers and the book, among which stand out: the music composed for the book La casa sin sombra by the Argentine writer Claudio Archubi; the videopoems made for her books Yana wayra, La mujer de la bestia, Perú and Abro el miedo; the podcast "Cuerpas" for the poetry journal La primera vértebra, and a cycle of interviews to Latin American writers for the Casa Cultural - Espacio de Arte Trenzando Fuerzas.

Vania Milla (Lima, 2005) is studying Communications at the University of Lima and intends to specialize in Journalism. She is an avid reader and enjoys spending her free time playing guitar and biking around the city. She began studying English at a young age and has a keen interest in translation as a means of bringing Spanish--language literary production to English--speaking readers. is is her first published translation.

Margarita Saona studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is head of the department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois. She is interested in issues of gender, memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published numerous articles, the books on literary and cultural criticism, Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (Londres, 2014), two books of short fiction, Comehoras (Lima, 2008) and Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017). Her latest publications are Despadre: Masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana (Editorial Gafas Moradas, 2022), which deals on the representation of masculinity in Peruvian literature, and La ciudad en que no estas (Cocodrilo Ediciones, 2021) a collection of her short stories that has also been published in English as The Ghost of You (tr. Luciana Erregue, Laberinto Press, 2023.) (University of Illinois at Chicago).