The English-language debut of Verónica Zondek, COLD FIRE is a book-length meditation on the wind in which--according to Eliot Weinberger--the renowned Chilean poet demonstrates that to think about the wind is to think about everything.

COLD FIRE is a timeless chronicle of the human facing the dread and magic of its own materiality. This book-length poem, written in a voice as piercing and tentative as the elements themselves and translated into English by Katherine Silver, is an intimate and irreducible exploration of our vulnerability, solitude, plunder, and death, and posits the wind, with its omnipresent voice and its versatile metaphoric essence, as the fundamental source of energy, renovation, and destruction.

Like her native condors that leap from a cliff and float for hours on the upstreams, Verónica Zondek glides through a book-length meditation on the wind, here kept aloft in English by the force of Katherine Silver's translation. And, not surprisingly in a narrow country between the wind-generating mountains and sea, Zondek beautifully demonstrates that to think about the wind is to think about everything.--Eliot Weinberger

With energy, gravity, and vibrant movement and rhythm, renowned Chilean poet Verónica Zondek meditates on the complex intertwinings of our bodies with the social world, the natural world, and death. Here, the trauma of anonymity, decomposition, abandonment, exile, and 'the voids of soul', are presented through a poetic narrative of poignant urgency. All of which is communicated in this brilliant new translation by Katherine Silver, one of our most important and distinguished translators of contemporary Latin American literature. This is a moving and surprising book.--Daniel Borzutzky

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Environmental Studies.