So-Lair Storm

Author: Andrés Ajens

Translator: Andrés Ajens

Publisher: Black Sun Lit (2024)

Chilean poet, essayist, translator, cultural agitator, and literary activist Andrés Ajens (AA)—cult writer in Spanish, hidden writer and writer of what the folds of history hide—is raised from the antipodes of literature, with a poetic project that stands out for both its forcefulness and its hybridity. A poetry of articulation and dis/articulation, of artifice, of disengagement and dismemberment, So-Lair Storm moves between broken narratives, different materialities (letters, emails, diary fragments), critical essay, and experience. In his diverse cultural scaffolding, Ajens combines indigenous writing and languages, the history of Western literature, post-structuralist philosophy and linguistics, manipulating geographical and scriptural boundaries, breaking down, chewing and digesting language like no other. His is a poetry that resists not only oblivion, atrocity, and colonialism, but also translation and interpretation. Erín Moure rises to the challenge, giving birth to poems that not only “pick up the gauntlet” of AA’s literary bet, but also have a life of their own and summon new questions.