Starke, Úrsula: Wisteria: Complete Works 2000–2020

Lavender Ink / Diálogos, paperback

Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval & Jeannine Marie Pitas

Publication Date: January 1, 2026

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Wisteria collects the work of four books Úrsula Starke published between 2000 and 2020 as well as some uncollected poems that appeared in journals in the same time frame. Her style might be called neobaroque, drawing on imagery from Catholicism and engaging intertextually with a wide range of writers and artists, but always enacting a subversion of traditional Catholic imagery into a discourse of resistance to patriarchal social norms, while drawing on a variety of themes: struggles with mental illness, the premature deaths of loved ones to cancer and other illnesses, and the historical trauma of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Surreal and shocking, astonishing and disturbing, Úrsula Starke’s “Auschwitz at dawn” is “lit by a hundred naked men.” Delicately translated, transporting both sense and sound, the poems stir in English while keeping some ghost music from the original. “I was born on an autumn morning/ with the garden’s/ posthumous roses;/ the cold darkness of a tomb/ The dead in the nearby cemetery are grateful/ to lie beneath the earth.”  The book offers scenes of enormous literary force: interior landscapes converted into architecture, reflections about madness and the body, and a constant questioning of identity. The writing is crude, baroque, visceral; its poetics does not wish to seduce but to cut.