Hernández, Elvira: Bodies Found in Various Places

Cardboard House Press, paperback

Translated by Daniel Borzutsky & Alec Schumacher

Publication Date: August 21, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

The first anthology of Elvira Hernández’s poetry translated into English brings the award-winning contemporary Chilean poet's work of love, survival, persistence, disturbance, amazement, and delight to a new audience.

Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.

PRAISE

Elvira Hernández wrote her poem “The Chilean Flag” after she herself had been detained and tortured by the dictatorship for not complying with its lies. While Chileans were trained to look the other way, to go quiet by this terror, Elvira Hernández wrote a poem that could not be printed. Yet, the poem escaped like a prisoner and began circulating in Xeroxes, from hand to hand, until ten years later it was finally printed in Buenos Aires. In Elvira Hernández’s poetry, each line restores the right of words to speak. Each word becomes a healer, a prayer for a wounded, enslaved humanity forced to obey the rule of profit over life.—Cecilia Vicuña, author of Spit Temple

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elvira Hernández, pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important voices of contemporary poetry in the Southern Cone and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. Some of her most important works include: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!)(1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds From My Window) (2018). She is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.

Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. In 2019, he published The Chilean Flag, a translation of Elvira Hernández’s book which was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by The American Literary Translators.