Upper Volta warns: words might suddenly shift in meaning... with no warning. A colony supposedly shuttered, with an abiding significance. Here are the Germans and the subjunctive, the flags and the Peruvians, the Mapuches and a shopkeeper. Slips of the tongue that reveal the class of the speaker, the caste, the catastrophe of a daily precarious living.
JD Pluecker
Neoliberal policies have consequences. But neoliberal policies applied by fire and sword against a population through decades of exploitation, marginalization, and depletion of national resources have lasting and hard to erase consequences. Yanko González demonstrates that there are no forbidden topics for poetry. Whether the upstart that tries to hide his/her upbringing, whether the supermarket cashier getting in charge of the vegetables section, Upper Volta is like an imaginary country inhabited by many voices, all of them strange and familiar at the same time. With a masterful ear to recreate the sounds and the idioms of Chile, González (with the accomplished translation by Stephen Rosenshein) is here to show us that we don’t speak a language; a language, or many languages, speak for us.
Cristián Gómez Olivares
The reader is going to walk away wounded, because the author makes no concessions. On full display here is the difficulty of existing as a shadow in a work that combines the labored use of speech with massive aesthetic demands.
Rosabetty Muñoz
Such is the potency of the everyday in these verses that I surrender to the evidence of being before an omniscient poet that sees life as it truly is. Therefore I say, “we’re connected.” The most that you can ask of a poet. With poetry like this, there is no desire to return to the normal discourse—it appears boring, slow, and heavily starched compared with this thrust of refreshing futurism.
Clemente Riedemann
Upper Volta is a terrestrial satellite crewed by beings barely human. A universal mirror that Yanko González positions in the liver of Africa so we can see our reflection once and for all and stop lying to ourselves as a species. So we go from your phobia to my phobia and from my phobia to your phobia. As always, brothers, when poetry puts forth such dramatic evidence, there is nowhere to hide.
Diego Maquieira
