Violence, Nature, and Memory in Contemporary Colombian Poetry

Abstract

This study provides a close reading of 13 Colombian poems, examining how contemporary poets address different types of violence perpetuated in Colombia, including the armed conflict, sexism, and racism. It traces the relationships between violence, memory, forgetting, mourning, nature, and language. The analysis draws from recent critics on issues of a poetics of survival, relationships between wounding and wounded bodies that depart from romantic and lyric representations of nature, and that respond to the singularity of Colombia's violences.