Carapace Dancer

In Carapace Dancer, Natalia Toledo revisits some themes from her award-winning collection The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (tr. Clare Sullivan, Phoneme, 2015).

Toledo returns to the landscape of her childhood where animals predict the future and grandmothers shape masa. Again, she questions Zapotec traditions even as she mourns their disappearance. But in these poems Toledo takes more risks: she exposes her pain and that of her people in images at once elegant and raw. Like the crab, she edges into the past, but the hard shell of experience or cynicism provides only temporary protection to the human vulnerability beneath it.

Natalia Toledo was born in Juchitán, Oaxaca. Her bilingual poetry (Zapotec-Spanish) has been included in numerous journals and anthologies, and translated into languages as varied as Nahuatl, Italian, and Punjabi. She has received support from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) and the Oaxaca State Fund for Culture and the Arts (FOESCA). Since 2019, she has served as Mexico’s Under Secretary of Cultural Diversity and Literacy.

Clare Sullivan, professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, teaches language, poetry, and translation. She and her students work regularly on translation projects for the Louisville community. Recently she guest edited a special issue of Translation Review: ＂Translation as Community＂ Vol 1: Issue 1 (2023). Her collaborative translations of Natalia Toledo and Enriqueta Lunez have appeared in Phoneme Media and Ugly Duckling Presse.