Marjorie Agosin

Marjorie Agosin's intensely personal long poem "The Light of Desire" is both a secular and sacred meditation on love and its meanings in the land of Israel. Following the tradition of the "Song of Songs" and the secular poetry of Sepharad, the beloved in "The Light of Desire" is both physical and metaphorical. The lovers' bodies are the paths, the geography, leading not only from desire to sensual pleasure, but to memory and illumination. The light on the pink stones of Jerusalem, the sunlight of Galilee, from hills to the sea, the fragrant air and mantle of stars, all become one in this tender, rhapsodic expression of longing and desire. This is not unrequited love, but rather a reciprocal passion that brings exquisite pleasure, pain, a sense of fragility, and the hope and belief in that which is eternal. The poem was written over a four-year span in Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim neighborhood, overlooking the wall of the Second Temple, and these hallowed surroundings imbue Agosin's poetic voice. Lori Marie Carlson's sensitive translation maintains the spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.

The Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile. It was also a defining moment in the life of writer Marjorie Agosin. This collection of prose vignettes and free verse draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jeweven in the land she calls home to create a striking portrait of a life of exile. The tone of the book varies as it lyrically explores the geography of Chile and weaves into it the themes of exile and oppression. At times the words become hymns to the physical beauty of her country, evoking the grandeur of this land extending to the southernmost tip of the world. At times they are intimate and melancholy, exploring personal and familial history through miniature portraits that reveal the pain of being different. Finally the tone becomes angry as she denounces the injustices committed against her friends and against the families of the disappeared during the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Combining themes of memory, childhood, minority issues, Judaism, and political oppression, this collection contains some of Agosin's strongest work. Of Earth and Sea is a poetic autobiography that explores the world of Chile with eyes that see both despair and hope.

On the impulse behind Cartographies, Marjorie Agosín writes, "I have always wanted to understand the meaning of displacement and the quest or longing for home." In these lyrical meditations in prose and poetry, Agosín evokes the many places on four continents she has visited or called home. Recording personal and spiritual voyages, the author opens herself to follow the ambiguous, secret map of her memory, which "does not betray." Agosín's journey begins in Chile, where she spent her childhood before her family left in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Of Santiago Agosín writes, "Day and night I think about my city. I dream the dream of all exiles." Agosín also travels to Prague and Vienna, ancestral homes of her grandparents, and to Valparaíso in Chile, which received them as immigrants. Kneeling among the yellow mounds at the Terezin concentration camp, where twenty-two of her relatives died, Agosín places "small stones, shrubs, the stuff of life on graves I did not recognize." And then on through the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Americas . . . Everywhere, she is drawn to women in whose devotion and creativity she sees a deep vein of hope—from Julia, keeper of the synagogue at Rhodes, to the women potters in the Chilean town of Pomaire. Agosín writes of diaspora, exile, and oppression, yet only to highlight the dignity and valor of those who find refuge in their humanity and their art, in community and tradition. Cartographies shows us what can be found when we journey with openness, as approachable to strangers as we are to ourselves.

Over the past decade over 350 women around the city of Juarez, Mexico, have been raped and murdered. The remains of these brutalized young women continue to be found scattered in the parched desert, vacant city lots, and roadside ditches. Others are never found. In Secrets In The Sand, Agosin through her words and images invites her readers to bear witness to the reality that the grieving families of the disappeared and murdered young women face every day. As a poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin has dedicated her life's work to the search for justice and human dignity.

This collection of letters chronicles a remarkable, long-term friendship between two women who, despite differences of religion and ethnicity, have followed remarkably parallel paths from their first adolescent meeting in their native Chile to their current lives in exile as writers, academics, and political activists in the United States. Spanning more than thirty years (1966-2000), AgosÍn's and SepÚlveda's letters speak eloquently on themes that are at once personal and political-family life and patriarchy, women's roles, the loneliness of being a religious or cultural outsider, political turmoil in Chile, and the experience of exile.