Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk

Rocío Ágreda Piérola

Translated by Jessica Sequeira

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $12

December 2021
Read an excerpt

I dream of a man from Kiev reading Spinoza in prison
while illiterate men ride camels in the eye of the desert
and on the bank in the shadow of being
everyone contemplates a wasteland of symbols
called philosophy

sueño a un hombre de Kiev leyendo a Spinoza en la cárcel
mientras hombres iletrados acamellonan en el ojo del desierto
y en la ribera a la sombra del ser
se contemplan todos un páramo de símbolos
llamado filosofía

The work of the philosopher-poet Rocío Ágreda Piérola is full of ghostly traces, smudged lines from the past turned with care into new forms through references to writers like Héctor Viel Temperley and Dante, rewritings of Biblical verses, redraftings of personal memory, and forays into history with the Spanish conquistadors. In Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, Ágreda Piérola’s sensuous language is populated by animals (hyenas, wolves, birds, cats, shoals of fish), parts of the body (the tongue, the nervous system), and the physical stuff of childhood (those horses drawn with blue chalk, erased from the wall yet forever archived in memory, to be drawn and redrawn). The questions here of how to create meaning from solitude and silence do not rely on any facile premade identities or autobiographical intimacies, but seek constantly to unsettle the known, challenging given truths to forge a meaningful communication.

About the Author

Rocío Ágreda Piérola (Cochabamba, 1981) studied philosophy and literature. Her work has appeared in anthologies in Peru and Chile, and she has collaborated with the Bolivian publishing projects “Género aburrido” and “Lenguanegra.” In 2017 she published the poetry collection Detritus (Maki_Naria), and is currently working on a manuscript called Quetiapina 400mg.

Praise

Thinking always leads to madness, according to Maurice Blanchot. Poetic writing could be the trace of that madness, at least the writing of Rocío Ágreda Piérola. She speaks in a language unknown even to herself, for it is the clear, strange language of the illiterate who conceals and spits her vision through her voice of night. She might take as her own the words of the mysterious poet Héctor Viel Temperley: "I meet with my poetry when I don't know how to write it.” Opening Horses Drawn with Blue Chalk, we witness the radiance of this meeting, swimming through her house of water.

Stéphane Chaumet

About the Translator

Jessica Sequeira has published A Luminous History of the Palm (Sublunary Editions), A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), Rhombus and Oval (What Books Press) and Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero Books), along with many translations. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her version of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke (Pushkin Press). Currently she is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-86-2
Chapbook
Saddle-stitched. 48 pp, 5.25 x 8.25 in
Publication Date: December 01 2021
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Señal #16