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.

Translated by: Clare Sullivan