Beasts Behave in Foreign Land

by Ruth Irupe Sanabria

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097635
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

Seconds before Giving Her Testimony, the Witness Requests a Glass of Water to Quell the Voices Planted in Her on the Day the Soldiers Came for Her Family

“Begin with: this is the only picture I have of the three of us together.”

“Put that away! The carrion needs to rest.”

“Don’t be a pussy. Look at the photo.”

“Now that’s that face of a mother who would rather be anywhere else but at her daughter’s first birthday.”

“Do you even know the names of the soldiers on trial?”

“Your mother shaved her legs and wore a dress that day.”

“Don’t mention your father. For his sake.”

“Tell the judges how mirrors grow down your mother’s spine; how her neck is the
Long bending neck of an old adolescent, a new mother, a narcissist.”

“Don’t be a self-absorbed cunt. Focus on the grenades, the helicopters, and the moment of kidnapping. Keep the mommy issues for your bourbon.”

“How do you say ‘Your Honor’ in Spanish?”

“Since we’re on the topic of honesty, you should mention that your mother never loved your father like that. She needed him. To get out of her father’s house. Sadly, she got knocked up on her honeymoon.”

“First of all, no one wants to hear how you two are as warm and fuzzy with each other as a pair of frozen steaks. Even if it is relevant to the case.”

“And squeeze as much eloquence as you can from your Spanish.”

“Your mother braided all of her resilience into your umbilical helix of breath and memory. You’ll do fine.”

“Focus: the flashbacks, the exile, the silence.”

“Bleh. The skeletons are on parade. Again.”

“Testifying validates the historical and political significance of the individual’s experience. However, in trials like these, for crimes against humanity perpetrated by military forces against its own citizenry, an insular approach to understanding one’s narrative in which one delineates her testimony from the collective ‘I’ as critically important is problematic. The witness knows that once her turn on the stand is through, what she has offered will be absorbed into a larger, stronger mass that will outlive her. The witness has betrayed the nacreous silence, which, for decades, she labored over. She might feel disoriented, even embarrassed, by the sudden release and exposure of what obsessed and defined her most.”

“What the fuck?”

“Hasta la muerte, camarada.”

“The Judges are listening. Speak.”

Table of Contents

Introduction Lorna Dee Cervantes 13

I

The Collapse of Greta Oto, the Transparent Revolutionary Butterfly 17

Mother's Milk 19

Seconds before Giving Her Testimony, the Witness Requests a Glass of Water to Quell the Voices Planted in Her on the Day the Soldiers Came for Her Family 20

Ars Poetica 22

Mother, Daughter, Soldier, Ten Ants, and One Turtle: An Intertextual Fable/Testimony in Translation 23

Landfall 26

The Cardinal Delivers Us 27

Undone by the Shadows (Four Variations on the Same) 28

Beasts Behave in Foreign Land 29

Lap of Crows 31

Refugees in the Attic on Lamont Street 32

Distance 34

Hiking with My Father 35

Midnight Convergence on the Ravaged Heart 36

Latin American Women Writing in Exile 37

Because I Hate Standing Still and Waiting in the Dark 39

Ruby 40

The Small Parts Still Left 42

Mourning Doves 43

Dinners 44

Came 45

Victory Is Ours 47

Lunchbox Note #1 48

Lunch box Note #2 49

The Unraveling 50

What Loves, Leaves 53

Narcissus Poeticus 55

II

The Eleventh House 59

Tatuaje 61

Dawn in DC 63

American Telephone, 1985 65

For the Girl Who Made Us Call Her "Big Sister" 68

The Recurring Dream of Mining Caverns with You 69

Lush 71

The Plan 73

What Love Made Us 74

Vulgar Us 75

Desecada la delicada 76

Along the Edge 78

Love Like a Militant 79

The Way to It 80

Exit 9 82

Amazonas 84

Interviews

• National publicity efforts targeting:

+Industry journals such as Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, Kirkus, Bookforum, and ShelfAwareness

+Major newspapers and journals such as The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker

+National blogs and podcasts such as Salon, Slate, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed Books, Huffington Post, Barnes & Noble Review, NPR

+Major national radio stations

+Publications the author has written for, been featured in, or whose work has been reviewed in

+Other publications focusing on the Latin American and immigrant experiences, politics, and poetry

+Schools and organizations the author is associated with

• Marketing to bookstores, libraries, book clubs, and universities

• Article pitches by author to major industry publications, newspapers, and blogs

• Author and book signing at the 2017 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference

• Multi-city book tour encompassing New York (New York), Washington, DC, and California (Los Angeles).

• Promotion online through the author’s website

• E-newsletter promotion to several-thousand-plus contacts

• Promotion through social media to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Amazon

Editorial Reviews

Part prayer. Part testimony. All heart. Beasts Behave in Foreign Land refuses to lie down and be quiet, refuses to compromise beauty or the beast: the beast we carry within, the one forged in us through multiple denials. This book, with its confident and competent voice and diverse ways of seeing, leads us into and out of the labyrinth of the self and the labyrinths of history—presents herstory with its torture and song. This book sings. This book tells the truth, the truth of ‘our vacuous beginning on the highway / and the big inevitable bang.’” —Lorna Dee Cervantes

“Memory after memory, gesture after gesture, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land is an exquisite chronicle of insistent survival, a matrilineal journey of decades and thousands of miles between Argentina and New Jersey. Ruth Irupé Sanabria masterfully juxtaposes the plain language of government-sanctioned violence, the inheritance of its physical and psychological toll upon politicized bodies, against the language of nature and innocence. Listen for these voices: the voices of Ruth’s family, the voices of hard-earned wisdom, the voices of three generations of women artists in conversation—mother and daughter, daughter and mother, daughter and grandmother (in a series of stunning ekphrastics). Rooted in a contemplative present, weighted in stark and singular memory, these poems bequeath resistance—love in the face of extinction—to generations to come.” —Rich Villar, essayist/poet/activist, author of Comprehending Forever

“‘Heart, I’ve confused you with a tambourine again,’ writes Ruth Irupé Sanabria in the title poem of this wrenching, startling collection. The poet writes from the collective experience of crimes against humanity in Argentina, where a military dictatorship disappeared countless thousands, her mother included. This is a landscape of nightmares, of ‘headless uncles,’ yet, time and again Sanabria summons the courage to testify, to speak on behalf of the ghosts, living and dead, to name the assassins. That she speaks from the perspective of a child, wondering about the whereabouts of her mother even as the adults distract her with chocolate and steaming milk, makes these poems all the more haunting and moving. She shakes life from that tambourine heart, rising above the violence done to body and spirit, eloquently articulating humanity in the face of inhumanity. Ruth Irupé Sanabria offers proof that human beings can make poetry out of anything, no matter how ravaged the heart may be, telling the stories embedded in the skin and bone, burnishing the shards of memory till they gleam brightly.” —Martín Espada

From the Publisher

04/15/2017
Winner of the 2014 Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Poetry Prize, this second collection was inspired by the author's testifying in trials nearly four decades after her parents were imprisoned and tortured during Argentina's military dictatorship. What's surprising, then, is that the language is not brutally realistic, with the beginning lines nearly surreal in their portrayal of an Admitting Chair scolding a "limp-winged" snitch working through the Throat of Silence and stalked by the Beast of Memory. But then such heightened imagery may be the best way to deal with unbelievable horror. This evocative collection unfolds as both cultural celebration and chronicle of survival: "Draw sun, draw star,/ still bones are cast as dust," says Sanabria, and "out of our inevitable estrangement/ I'd make us up again and again." VERDICT Startling and successful; for most readers.

Library Journal