Kauneus (la Bellezza) is the Finnish word for ‘beauty’ and the name of Peruvian poet Roxana Crisólogo’s second to last collection, translated from the Spanish by Kim Jensen and Judith Santopietro. As this brief but memorable selection will indicate, Crisólogo’s work is as much about language, as it is about poetry, ‘stripped’ and ‘soiled’ to capture the complexity of lives trapped between continents, of identities in flux, and of a passionate voice that has honed metaphor and surrealism to engage with challenging socio-political realities. This is a bold feminist consciousness that does not sing merely of itself and for itself, but of and for the silenced and dispossessed. I have much admiration for the way in which K. Jensen and J. Santopietro have so masterfully captured the poems’ throbbing, multivalent flesh, its gorgeously luminescent skin, allowing the English language to keep deconstructing the readers’ understanding of what ‘beauty’ might be expected to mean.
