Beasts Behave in Foreign Land

By Ruth Irupe Sanabria

Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria’s poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781597095778

Ruth Irupe Sanabria

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s first collection of poetry, The Strange House Testifies (Bilingual Press), won second place (Poetry) in the 2010 Annual Latino Book Awards. Her second collection of poems received the 2014 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Award and will be published in 2017. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Women Writing Resistance and U.S. Latino Literature Today. She holds an MFA from NYU and a B.A. in English and Puerto Rican & Hispanic Caribbean Studies from Rutgers. She works as a high school English teacher and lives with her husband and three children in Perth Amboy, NJ.

Book preview

Introduction

Open this book:

And with good luck, we will swim

in the pool of a human being’s memory.

—Latin American Women Write In Exile

We, the offspring’s offspring / who are telling a story are in these pages; in this case, one of what another will not do to another human being. Here are profusely beautiful, startlingly savage and achingly lyrical docupoems wrought and rendered from one human being’s memory.

Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s poems are not so much political as they are providing the bodies to witness from four generations of females—as evidence that the political is personal by unravelling the facts and effects of political foreign policy upon a single family and rippling out. Beasts behave as beasts will do in a foreign land, as they do here across our American geo-political borders.

This is a poetry that sings itself whole, as Walt Whitman sang a song of Self—for I, too, am America—that mass of humanity here in this time. This is a poetry of detail and Truth as only a Latina living in US exile can present it. Each poem attests to its own individuality, voice and craft. There is no one style or school of poetry in this book. There is the truth of the poem and the minute particulars of experience, some carved out of documents of witness and trial. These well-crafted poems testify as much as they enchant. This is a poetry of survival and grace; each poem, a single strategy; every word, another