Andean Nuclear Spring

Author: Agustín Guambo

Translator: Carlos Moreno

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2019)

Agustín Guambo’s Andean Nuclear Spring is a literary artifice that situates us in the heart of the post-apocalypse in Quito. In this nuclear spring, Quito could be any other city in Latin America: a reality populated by plain landscapes, dreams, rhinoceri, the changing direction of wind, ashes and chants passed into the future from one generation to the next. Disparate voices speak: from native quechua to punk songs, they carry parts of a story whose narration describes a moment near us but not quite where we are, mapping, where destruction burrowed its way into our societies. This is an attempt toward faith in our ideologies, identities, cultural backgrounds, and the never-ending presence of love. And—or—it is a Latin American (that is, American) neo-baroque aesthetics of the void, that vast unfilled body like a starry night on the páramo.