Overview

One fine day, ""on the screen, an X-ray of your brain / they show you a perfectly defined heart-shaped stain / an indeterminate lesion in the left frontal lobe / the neurologists don't recognize it / possible low-grade tumor / and the world suddenly falls to the floor, you collapse."" The story told in El lugar de las palabras begins there. It continues with ""hospital needles, my arms battered / they can't find my veins anymore."" The doctor reassures her (""there's no need to worry, you'll recover"") and also distresses her (""There's a chance / that you might lose / your words""). The fear of losing words: ""... my words / I never thought they were / in danger / that one day I might / not find them / words always came / to rescue me."" ""I'm so scared / I don't know where to put it.""

Full Product Details

9781969317132

Table of Contents

Reviews

""You may lose your words for a while,"" the doctor told her, but María Gómez Lara was not going to let that happen. When diagnosed with a brain tumor one centimeter from her language center, she did not let terror silence her. Instead, the poet wrote. With exquisite candor, The Place Where Words Reside documents the thoughts of a patient in medical crisis, thoughts that are all-too-often isolated, dismissed, and erased. Masterfully translated by Curtis Bauer and presented here in both languages, these poems prove that real healing happens when we share our stories, when we keep our words alive. This book should be placed in every cancer hospital in the country. Rebecca Gayle Howell It's a shocking book. There is an overwhelming, profound, unabashed sincerity here. An overflowing sincerity that is nevertheless expressed in controlled language, with great craft, a lot of literary work and so much poetic wisdom that the words flow like poems and intimate confessions at the same time. Moving and excellent. Darío Jaramillo Agudelo

Author Information

María Gómez Lara (Bogotá, 1989) has published the poetry collections Después del horizonte (After the Horizon) (2012), Contratono (Countertone) (Visor, 2015), El lugar de las palabras (The Place Where Words Reside) (Pre-Textos, 2020), Don Quijote a voces (Don Quixote out loud) (Pre-Textos, 2024) and the anthology Palabras piel (Skin Words) (Frailejón Editores, 2022). Contratono won the XXVII Loewe Foundation International Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers and includes a prologue by the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale. It was also translated into Portuguese by the poet Nuno Júdice under the title Nó de sombras (2015). Some of her poems have also been translated into Italian, English, Chinese and Arabic and have appeared, both in Spanish and in bilingual editions, in different media in Latin America and Spain and in numerous anthologies of Colombian and Latin American poetry. She studied literature at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, holds an M.F.A. in creative writing in Spanish from New York University and an M.A. in Romance literatures and languages from Harvard University, where she also earned a PhD in Latin American poetry. She is currently a professor at Tufts University in Madrid. Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator from the United States. His most recent poetry collection is American Selfie (Barrow Street Press, 2019). His translation publications of contemporary Spanish-language literature include María Sánchez's Land of Women (Trinity University Press, 2022), Clara Muschietti's This Could Take Some Time (Eulalia Books, 2022) and Fabio Morábito's The Shadow of the Mammoth (Other Press, 2025). He lives in Spain and Texas and teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available