A poetic essay by Colombian writer Eliana Hernández-Pachón that explores the worlds of ritual, sanctity and abundance.
Suspended Waters is a poetic essay that connects four objects: a death raft woven from reeds that has come ashore in the wrong place, a gold Muisca raft that evokes the legend of "El Dorado," Amazonian flutes made of palm that can only be seen by men and a sheet of paper used for museum records.
Eliana Hernández-Pachón explores how these objects sustain different worlds. Through a text pulsing with the life of more-than-human beings, with multiple voices both solo and choral, Hernández-Pachón evokes worlds of ritual, sanctity, abundance. She asks: what does it mean to possess, to preserve, to let go?
Eliana Hernández-Pachón was born in 1989 in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first book, The Brush, is an aching work of historical reckoning. She commemorates the massacre in the village of El Salado in 2000 and the wider tragedy of mass murders in Colombia. The Brush received Colombia's National Poetry Prize in 2020, making Hernández-Pachón the youngest poet to ever receive this honor. She is part of Como un lugar, a poetry collective that runs an independent press in Buenos Aires and organizes literary festivals in New York City and Latin America. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
