“In this ranging, insightful, brilliant collection, Ogliastri writes, ‘Tyrants try to silence the voice of their conscience. They choose madness rather than confronting the truth. I have opted for compassion.’ But is compassion translatable from one language, or one consciousness, to another? Yvette Neisser and Patricia Bejarano Fisher have created a vibrant narrative that says ‘Yes!’ While the tone and tenor of the poems here are both haunting and surprising, those ghosts and shocks are complemented by a careful, precise, and egoless carrying from one diction to another, something especially admirable in a collection so dedicated to both poetry and history. This book is a victory of words—’My mother sat on the balcony // her entwined fingers / clutching a carnation in her lap’—a stunning new addition to verse and time. Jiang Qing is a figure perfect for the enjambed line, and Neisser and Fisher have served those lines with a delicate touch, a purposeful intention, and a glorious tribute of rhetoric to the work Ogliastri has so precisely invented.”

Jesse Waters, translator of Taslima Nasrin's Burning Roses in My Garden

“What an extraordinary achievement. María Teresa Ogliastri invites the reader on a journey through the heart and soul of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous figures, Jiang Qing, better known as Madame Mao, wife of Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. These poems imagine Jiang’s inner life as she evolved from traumatized daughter of a violent man, to orphaned survivor, to movie star, to become the brutal repressor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Written in Spanish, the poems are translated with exquisite finesse by Yvette Neisser and Patricia Bejarano Fisher, retaining both their flavor of Asian culture and the pulse of the original Spanish.”

Katie King, translator of My Clavicle: And Other Massive Misalignments by Marta Sanz and One Year and Three Months by Luis García Montero

"This book is a masterpiece of creativity and grace about history’s darkest corners. Deeply relevant across the ages, and in particular today, this book plots to make the reader consider the panic of deprivation, and the sadistic power it unleashes on the world. Ogliastri is translated into pure perfection with language that deserves a standing ovation. Can we overcome our demons? This project softens us to hope that we can. For if not, we will destroy ourselves."

Leeya Mehta, author of Extinction and director of The Alan Cheuse International Writer's Center, George Mason University