Aurora was first published in Mexico City in 1994 by Ediciones Equilibrista, and was the author's third full-length collection. Composed of five extended sequences, Aurora contemplates the pacts we make with ourselves, others, and nature in order to survive. The poems explore what happens when those bonds of trust and dependence are weakened or broken by infidelity, death, and time. In her writing, Lopez-Colome combines a highly associative lyrical sensibility with an insistence on philosophical exactness. Pura Lopez-Colome was born in Mexico City in 1952, but also spent part of her childhood and youth in Merida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the USA. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, publishing literary criticism, poems, and translations in a regular column for the newspaper Unomasuno. The author of several important books, including Aurora and Intemperie, as well as a Collected Poems titles Musica inaudita (Eds. Verdehalago, 2004), she is also the translator into Spanish of works by Samuel Beckett, H.D., Seamus Heaney, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Hass, Robert Creeley and others.

Translated by: Jason Stumpf