New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña has embodied a life of political and social activism through poetry, visual art, film and performance. New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states, and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry "the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other." In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads, and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.

PRAISE

For Cecilia Vicuña, the textual and the visual exist and function together...as if the making of objects and the shaping of words into images are knotted together like threads.

—Dr. Jordan Amirkhani

Few artists so buffeted by a lifetime of political circumstances have found such uniquely poetic ways to respond.

—Lucy Lippard