A Whale Is a Country— Isabel Zapata

In this collection of poems, Isabel Zapata progresses along what I will call the ethics of consideration: the ability to take into account the experience of others and act accordingly. While some of us are just beginning to explore that territory—David Foster Wallace wrote an essay considering lobsters and I once wrote a consideration of manatees—Isabel Zapata has immersed herself in this ethic with an entire book of animal considerations. At the beginning, she advises us, regarding shark eggs: "Consider their violent geometry," and in that verse resonates the tiger that William Blake also considered long ago. In Una ballena es un país (A Whale is a Country), Zapata considers cetaceans, felines, rhinoceroses, pets, and extinct beasts.

I see in Zapata's book the seed of a new heterodox humanism, a humanism that, in recognizing our animal condition, links us with the beasts and plants that our voracity is destroying. In each of these poems, I recognize myself, for they give voice to the desire, more human than any other, not to be left alone in the world, isolated, furious, and repressed. (Jorge Comensal)

No. Pages: 112 / Dimensions: 18 cm (Height) x 11 cm (Width)

ISBN: 9786078667055