Nace a los ocho año en el patio de la casa. Ha realizado acuciosos estudios nocturnes de lo desvelos, los azares y las causalidades estelares. Domadora de gatos, enóloga olfativa, zurda y epiléptica. Nunca ha estado en ningún taller, no ha participado en ningún concurso, no ha ganado ningún premio a las Letras.

[Born at the age of eight in the backyard of the house. She has conducted meticulous nocturnal studies of sleeplessness, of stellar chances and causalities.  Tamer of cats, enologist by nose, left-handed and epileptic. She has never been in a workshop; she has never entered any contests; nor has she won any literary awards.]

So goes the biographical note on the cover flap of Yo, la peor de todas (Contrabando del bando en contra, 2006), the book from which the following poems are drawn.  Estela Lamat, whose work might be generally understood in the context of the Latin American neo-baroque, is a Chilean poet associated with the so-called “Novisima” generation, a group of heterogeneous writers that re-deploys the density of dictatorship-era writing in response to the more diffuse and unofficial “dictatorships” that continue to police and control the social body.  Lamat is also the author of Sangre seca (Contrabando del bando en contra, 2005) and the forthcoming Colmillo molido, which will complete the trilogy.

Yo, la peor de todas (which translates as “I, the worst of all”) is a triptych of personae.  The three parts of the book—entitled “Pánico,” “Yo, la peor de todas,” and “La Llorona”—are animated by voices that take their inspiration from a syncretic mix of historical and mythological sources: the Greek god Pan, the poet/nun Sor Juana, and the folkloric spirit known as the “weeping woman.”  All of the poems here (save the last) are excerpted from the book’s second section, with voices from the first and last sections sometimes intervening as epigraphs.  These prose poems, bristling with urgency, take the form of the petition and play with the self-abasing formulae used by Sor Juana.  But while the formula “Yo, la peor de todas” signed in a divine petition (supposedly in blood) marked Sor Juana’s renunciation of writing, Estela Lamat turns this moment of historical silence into a chorus of poetic intensity. 

The last poem, in the voice of La llorona, comes from a cycle of monodies, and here again, we find a crucial expression of the Latin American feminine voice: while, according to legend, La llorona had only recourse to crying, Estela Lamat manifests a compelling language of articulated mourning.  These poems begin with what Julia Kristeva might call a “thetic moment” and, as a group, portray the shifting facets of a kaleidoscopic subject: “La llorona, I convey a music I don’t recognize”; “La llorona, I spit broken glass”; or, as in the poem here, “La llorona, I am guided by the power of death.”     

Because of the lack of punctuation to help us parse the frenetic rhythm of Lamat’s writing, it is tempting to say what Eliot said of Milton—that when we read these poems, we get a “physical sensation of a breathless leap.”  But it is more than that: we get a more dire sense of corporeal extremity, a sense of asphyxiation, of a vertiginous rush of a voice that has been wanting to speak for hundreds of years.