Women of the Big Sky

Poetry. Translation. Trilingual: Mapuzungun, Spanish, English. Argentinian poet Liliana Ancalao brings to us her mother tongue, Mapuzungun, which has survived the enslavement and dispossession of its people over centuries. Her poems, written in both Spanish and Mapuzungun by the author and then beautifully rendered into English by accomplished translator Seth Michelson, reclaim the Mapuche relationship to the land and to a kind of equality and freedom that fled the Americas long ago. Says editor Barbara Goldberg, Here the language is visceral–of the body, the skin, and never a doubt that the sensibility is feminine. Ancalao’s poetry lives in multiple dimensions of time. Despite being a poetry of dispossession and loss, it is also mythic and archtypical.