The poems in Dalmacia Ruiz-Rosas Samohod's Red Lip Peril are a blistering revelation. I read them in one gulp with my mouth open and my body being changed by a dynamic confrontation with an art that matches the brutality of economic and state violence with a force and energy that screams, reeks, despairs, wounds, and, ultimately, gives voice to a kind of theory: survival. Judah Rubin's translation amplifies Ruiz-Rosas Samahod's seering language of presence, disappearance, absence. Red Lip Peril's abject violence animates missing histories while at the same time showing us how to live in our perpetual state of decay.

Dalmacia Ruíz-Rosas’s poetics are both fierce and tender, political and intimate. Love, life, and counterculture are celebrated, while themes of resistance and defiance against power reveal the scope of possibility for the girl the poet once was: “The poet calls for the uprising / of the servants. I know / that the day will come / when the sun won’t flay our backs / We will make love without fatigue / We’ll have an ice cold lemonade in the desert”. Dalmacia’s city is the cartography of writing on the ground, of marches, of adventures and misadventures, and of the people who wander that city’s streets. It is a wild and poor city in which even “living is subversive”. The dangerous city, the dangerous poet, and her red lips that speak, that shout.