Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence

Author: Homero Aridjis

Translator: George McWhirter

Publisher: New Directions (2023)

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by the renowned Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, is a brilliant collection of recent poems. Aridjis seeks spiritual transformation through encounters with mythical animals, family ghosts, Mexico’s oppressed, female saints, writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Philip Lamantia, and naked angels in the metro. We find tributes to Goya and Heraclitus, denunciations of drug traffickers and political figureheads, and unforgettable imagined landscapes. As Aridjis himself writes, “A poem is like a door /we’ve never passed through.” Now past eighty, Aridjis reflects on the past and ponders the future. “Surrounded by light and the warbling of birds,” he writes, “I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same.”