Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology

Author: Chloe Garcia Roberts

Publisher: co•im•press (2024)

Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology by Chloe Garcia Roberts presents an astonishing collection of poem-essays that seek to reveal firm footholds and guiding threads to lead readers—and the author herself—though the treacherous and often ill-lit forests of liminality. In essays covering language worship, translation as sacrament, the allusion of memory, and more, Garcia Roberts creates a cumulative argument across ten works of intensifying emotional registers: language is not only a medium for communicating knowledge but is itself a font of understanding. Churning with boundless heart, thought, and wild desire to plumb the depths of self and spirit in search of geneses, these essays develop their form through the interplay of memory, etymology, religion, and translation. Collectively, Fire Eater offers a beacon for spiritual seekers and linguaphiles alike: a divination with the dictionary that is at once an invocation to unravel the complex knots of our in betweenness and an antidote to our despair.