Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk

Translated by Jessica Sequeira. The work of the philosopher-poet Rocio Agreda Pierola is full of ghostly traces, smudged lines from the past worked with care into new forms through references to writers like Hector Viel Temperley and Dante, rewritings of Biblical language, reworkings of personal memory, and forays into history with the Spanish conquistadors. In HORSES DRAWN WITH BLUE CHALK, Agreda Pierola’s sensuous language is populated by animals (hyenas, wolves, birds, cats, shoals of fish), parts of the body (the tongue, the nervous system), and the physical stuff of childhood (those horses drawn with blue chalk, erased from the wall yet forever archived in memory, to be drawn and redrawn). The questions here of how to create meaning from language, solitude, and silence do not rely on any facile premade identities or autobiographical intimacies, but seek constantly to unsettle the known, questioning given truths to forge a meaningful communication.

Poetry.