Negro es su rostro. Simiente. (Black Is Her Face / Seed)

Considered among the most important contemporary Mexican women writers, Seligson excelled as a poet, essayist, and novelist (her 1973 novel Otros son los sueños won the prestigious Xavier Villarutia Prize). The poetic works included in this posthumous anthology (Seligson died in February 2011) reunite an incandescent view into the poet's preoccupations with the phantasmagorical, spiritual, and philosophical. Written at the end of Seligson's life, the poems carry the emblem of her aesthetic, bearing a soft-spoken, distressed record of turmoil and pilgrim voyage toward catharsis. Bengal and Jerusalem (Seligson was a scholar of Judaism) form the closed universe here, structuring Seligson's errant musings on life and death in a type of spiritual travelog. As in Louise Glück's Wild Iris, Seligson's poems adopt a religious mythology—but whereas Glück uses the voice of the "unreachable father" as speaker, in Seligson's work He remains truly silent. This one-sided plea is only rarely long-winded (in "Mandala," for example), and it is most impressive when Seligson's penumbra, doubt, and lyricism meld to depict the heartfelt disorientation of looking upon the ocean, Buddha, or the eternal. In "Simiente" ("Seed"), Seligson addresses her son (who committed suicide) in an agitated prose poem that includes vignettes, letters, and reproductions of her son's diaries and drawings. Recommended for libraries and bookstores everywhere with a Spanish-language poetry collection.—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Palo Alto, CA