Inri

A harrowing meditation on tyranny, torture, and freedom by one of Chile’s most celebrated contemporary poets.

In 2001, the president of Chile publicly acknowledged that many of the bodies of the people who had disappeard under the dictatorship of Gemral Augusto Pinochet would never be recovered. The victims had been flown up in planes and, after having their eyes gouged out, pushed out over the mountains and deserts of Chile or the Pacific Ocean. Raol Zurita’s INRI (these are of course the letters nailed to the cross on which Jesus was crucified, identifying him as Jesus Christ, King of the Jews) is a visionary response to this atrocity, an agonized and deeply moving elegy for the dead in which the whole of Chile, with its snow covered cordilleras, its fields of wildflowers, its empty spaces and the sparkling sea beyond, is simultaneously transformed into the grave of its lost children and their living and risen body. This incantatory, prophetic work–prophetic in the same way that Jeremiah and Isaiah are prophetic, which is to say unapologetically political–is one of the great poems of our new century.