Ra繳l Zurita's Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet's
military dictatorship (1973-1990) through the disruptive and fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to
English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of Latin America's most important living poets. Ra繳l Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valpara穩so when, on the morning of the
coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Antepara穩so (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life),
Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile's violent transformation. The book begins with a photograph of Zurita's mutilated face, building, through a series of economical yet powerful
juxtapositions of voices and images, toward a crisis of faith in both God and humankind. Zurita's agonized and unsettling language expands and contracts as it traverses identities and
landscapes, ending in the paradise of the lived moment of political struggle.
