I have been anticipating Robin Myers’s translation of A Whale Is a Country (Una ballena es un país) by Isabel Zapata. These razor-sharp poems are rendered with clarity and require the reader to sit up, to pay attention to the world around us. Not only is the poet interested in the language of animals, she presents for us our precarious entanglements with the environment as destroyer gods and sensitive custodians. It’s clear to the poet: the choice is ours. She asks 'What does it say about us that we murder what we want to keep?' as a rhetorical device to prove our fickle commitment to this planet, its animals, and ultimately to ourselves. This is a book of ecopoetry, rendered bilingually, that I will return to again and again.

Isabel Zapata (Author)
Isabel Zapata was born in Mexico City in 1984. She studied political science at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York. She is the author of the titles Las noches son así (Broken English); Alberca vacía/Empty Pool translated by Robin Myers—bilingual edition (Argonáutica / Lumen); Una ballena es un país (Almadía); In vitro (Almadía) [In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation translated by Robin Myers, (Coffee House Press, 2023)]; and Tres animales que caben en el agua (Almadía). Her work has been included in Mexican journals such as la Revista de la Universidad de México, Periódico de poesía, and Letras Libres, among others; and international publications such as World Literature Today and Ancrages (Canada). In 2015 she, along with four friends, founded Ediciones Antílope under the motto, “We make books that we would like to read,” and their catalog includes narrative, la crónica, poetry, and essay. She received a 2016-17 grant from FONCA’s Jovenes Creadores, a prestigious government program supporting Mexican artists and writers.