Tal Vez Monstruos / Monsters Maybe

Elena Salamanca's TAL VEZ MONSTRUOS Fragmentos de [INCOGNITA FLORA CUSCATLANICA] / MONSTERS MAYBE Fragments from [INCOGNITA FLORA CUSCATLANICA] is an excerpt from a book-length poem that explores the intersection between ecology, colonial violence, personal memory, family-ancestral knowledge, and place. Written from a historian's eye for research and detail, Salamanca weaves poetic language to explore colonial practices that led to ecological devastations in El Salvador communities and across South America. Through this exploration, the author uplifts the fragility of wildflowers and transforms their survival as vessels of environmental memory. TAL VEZ MONSTRUOS / MONSTERS MAYBE is a poetic revelation of wonder and possibilities, of metiers that might have existed in complex forms before the time of wars and colonization, masterfully translated by Ryan Greene.

MONSTER MAYBE, more bestiary than herbarium, rescues the native flowers of Central America from extinction, extraction, and oblivion. Rebellious flowers that, when named, awaken fossils, make lava recede, and turn back history. Elena Salamanca, the poet, opens the way to investigate and discover from intuition and her senses that which History denies, hides, and forgets. The poem destroys the notion of the flower as fragile nature and unleashes the drive for life contained in the seed [medicinal, revolutionary] since before colonial processes and scientific documentation. Resistant, silent witnesses to the passage of time, wildflowers, rather than going unnoticed, germinate powerfully in the poem.

Poetry. History. Languages. Central America.