Dahlia de la Cerda’s English-language debut Reservoir Bitches was a fiery roar in the face of a culture of gendered violence and femicide, a punk album of a book that thrummed with rage and defiance in equal measure. In Medea Sang Me a Corrido, de la Cerda’s second book in translation, that rage is still there, but so too is a deeper sadness, a grief that haunts the tune. After all, a boy has died and Medea must come to sing him a corrido.

Fresh off a bloody breakup with Jason of the Argonauts, the Medea of classical myth has found her way to a modern-day Mexico cursed by endless cycles of narco-violence, where criminal organisations stake their claims with the blood of young men and boys. Mothers grieve sons buried in unmarked graves while others brave secret abortions lest their children just become new bodies for the endless violence – the only maternity they know ‘is the kind that breeds corpses’. Among these women, Medea descends in an army-green Volkswagen to act as friend, saviour and avenging angel, bringing life and inviting death in equal measure. She knows rage and the pain of dead children all too well, and seeks redemption for a past that was never entirely her own. Perhaps here, in this land of blood and tragedy, she can be reborn.

Once again, de la Cerda has given us a collection of stories that is of devastating impact, one whose power slowly grows with each new voice that joins the chorus until the collective coalesces into a passage that absolutely takes you out at the kneecaps. This is a book rich with lineage and allusion, yet it is never quite so powerful as when it is reckoning with the simple cataclysm of a life cut short.