Zurita on those ‘dead in ourselves’
Poetry is the great exception. Valerie Mejer Caso’s poems speak to this exception. By symbolically gathering the remains of her dead brother, Edinburgh Notebook asks us to confront the dead brother in ourselves, just as it begins to form the words of a possible rebirth. Dead in ourselves, suicides in ourselves, we see that great poetry is always an act of restitution by which we recover the parts of ourselves that we have killed. Children of a blood-thirsty God, whose laziness and boredom have been called history, society, and culture—whatever living parts of us remain run through the lines of this book, in its arresting tenderness, its love, the sweetness of its invocation, in the desert my love, because it strives to use those parts to rebuild something immense and inexplicable that was once and is no longer.
From Raul Zurita’s introduction to Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook, trans. Michelle Gil-Montero (Action Books, 2020)










