"The empty cage becomes an image of hope": Review of Bodies Found in Various Places: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández

Brent Ameneyro
Oct 8
5 min read

Bodies Found in Various Places: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes: Poemas selectos de Elvira Hernández |Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher | ISBN 978-1-945720-37-6 | Cardboard House Press | August 21, 2025

Before I begin this review, I’m going to say the quiet part out loud: we need to be reading more books in translation. I’m not going to get into the dismal statistics of how little people in the U.S. read books from outside of our own county (more specifically outside of Western Europe, too), but—and I know I don’t have to say this—their stories matter. These are necessary voices. Cardboard House Press publishes Latin American and Spanish poetry in translation, with a focus on innovative contemporary poetry, historical avant-garde, and social poetics. Buy their books. Read more translated works. Alright, I’ll get off my soapbox now and get into this beautiful anthology. Content warning: there are graphic elements to this collection, including torture and murder.

There’s an argument that can be made on whether the life of a poet matters when assessing the quality of their work. One side might say craft and craft alone, that the poet’s personal life shouldn’t influence the merit of their art. The other side says the poet must be considered, that their story is a necessary component when analyzing or judging their work. I think the personal narrative matters more in some work than in others. To say it quantitatively, sometimes I need or want 10% of the personal to support 90% of the weight carried by the poetry itself. Other times it’s 50/50, depending on the relationship of the poems to the poet. In the case of Elvira Hernández, I found it important to her work to learn that Hernández herself was detained and tortured for five days by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1979. Of course, I found it atrocious and incredibly sad, but speaking in terms of analyzing her poetry, I found this knowledge of her personal experience acting as a kind of invisible scaffolding, filling in some of the white space on the pages as I read the poems.

Hernández’s omnipresent personal narrative (which is not literally on the page, but can be felt) is best experienced in the opening poem/book The Chilean Flag. This book-length poem was circulated illegally, in opposition to the dictatorship, as photocopies passed hand to hand starting in 1981 until its official publication in 1991. I’m including a picture of a page from this poem below to retain the formatting:

When I read this poem out loud, actually saying “raise lower” each time and not just glossing over the tower of words, I had to take a deep breath halfway through. The repetition of “raise” and “lower” reflects the methods of forced compliance from the dictatorship. In the same way that a prisoner or detainee is exposed to repetitive torture, much like Hernández herself, the methodical raising and lowering forces the personified flag into submission. There is a similar repetition in military training which can be felt in the rhythm on this page. Think “left, right” commands to a marching army. Even in the simplest sense, repetitive work can be monotonous and mind-numbing, which leads to cognitive and physical fatigue and ultimately a compliant subject. The next section in the anthology includes five short poems, the titular work Bodies Found in Various Places. Each page is an encounter with a body found; the literal ramifications of a heartless dictatorship that murdered and discarded bodies throughout the country: they said it had been charred down to the bones they said nothing had been gathered and silence they spoke of the air of the soul and of oblivion the magisterial light descending like a votive candle from Hiroshima guilt appearing like a dynamited mine of lime A human disappeared after torture, sometimes mutilated and dismembered, becomes a body. Page after page, humanity is stripped from the bodies in these poems as Hernández uses the pronoun “it” to turn these humans into objects. “It had been charred down to the bones,” not he, she, or they. It, the lifeless body, is no longer associated with the human (or the “soul”) that once experienced love and pain in that body. Everyone who excavated the body, wrote about the body, experienced the horrors of what the body represented is referred to as “they.” They are living with a human pronoun, unlike the bodies. But “they” are not journalists, activists, government employees, onlookers, friends, or family, “they” are every body still living, still standing, still speaking, witnessing, documenting. There are no individuals in these poems, only a distinction between the living and the dead through the use of pronouns. The next section—or, should I say, book within the book—Giddy Up, Halley! Giddy Up! Focuses on Halley’s Comet. These poems provide a metaphysical, meditative respite from the intense political poems in the previous two sections. Although there is still a political heartbeat, this book feels more like a cosmic daydream, and it shows the range of Hernández’s voice. Corporal Punishment—the book after Giddy Up, Halley! Giddy Up!—feels surreal. Real world events merge with the imagination, with the occasional drawing interrupting the language. Complete with “stampeding timpanis” (a kind of drum) and a speaker who declares “I am the cum / that dripped forever / open in a cross.” After tumbling through the volatile, quasi-spiritual verse in this book, I was caught by one particular image: No one can canonize the blazing body of Rodrigo Rojas Denegri They want to extinguish the dazzle of his skin like an ampoule a little ampoule of flesh and kerosene Rodrigo was a 19-year-old photographer who was burned alive during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. An ampoule is a small sealed vial used to preserve something like a medicine. The word Hernández used in the original Spanish is “ampolla,” which could also be translated as bottle. Because Rodrigo and other protestors were carrying molotov cocktails, the “bottle” in this case could be alluding to the bottles used for molotov cocktails. “Ampolla” can also mean blister, depending on the context. And because of the context, I think Hernández was using a word that could mean all these things, but the translation for “ampolla” I found most compelling was “vessel holding catholic mass wine or water.” This page ends with “Amen,” making it read like a prayer.

The final two books in the collection—Santiago Waria and Birds from my Window—continue to show the range of Hernández's voice. There’s a clear thread weaving through all of these books, yet each one feels distinct and fresh. Birds from my Window, for example, could easily be perceived as the work of a nature poet or an environmentalist. Which, by all means, a poet can be many things, especially over a lifetime. But I return to the question about the poet’s personal narrative, how integral it is throughout Hernández's body of work. In the poem “Pleasure,” Hernández writes, “It’s a great pleasure / to contemplate / an empty cage.” Within the context of the book, Birds from my Window, the image of a birdcage and a bird flying free comes to mind. But within the context of her life and her entire body of work, the cage can represent where Hernández herself was detained, where people in her community were held and tortured, and then the empty cage becomes an image of hope. Hernández writes to witness, to document, to archive. There is no ego, no desire to be seen, no call for sympathy. What I see in these poems is the resilience of the Chilean people, and the power of poetry as resistance.

Brent Ameneyro is the author of the collection A Face Out of Clay (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024) and the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023). He was the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow. He currently serves as an associate at Letras Latinas and as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review.