Katabasis

Lucía Estrada's KATABASIS, winner of the 2017 Bogotá Poetry Prize, is the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English. It takes its title from the Greek word for descent, referring to both classical knowledge quests into the underworld by epic heroes and, more broadly, to any journey into madness, darkness, the unknown. A three-part plunge into the darkness of the world, and of the mind, Estrada's prose poems depict the night, the subconscious, and the surreal. Olivia Lott's seminal translation tracks the mercurial tempos and intertextualities of the poems, as it captures the double valence of political dissent and katabatic descent. This book reminds us that darkness is a space of enlightenment.