Celebrated Argentinian poet María Negroni explores her relationships to her mother and her writing through a veritable lash of language.
Heart of Damage is a "portrait of the artist as a young woman" that explores the mysteries of the mother-daughter bond and speculates about a link between trauma and poetic genesis. The mother in this narrative is a toxic, magnetic presence, shifting chameleonically from villain to victim--she is a pivot, a point of departure into investigations of writing's relationship to silence, exile, politics, feminism, and grief.
Constructed as a mosaic of memories, dreams, fantastic and speculative scenes, and ars poetica, Negroni stands with Maggie Nelson, Tove Ditelvsen, Barbara Guest, and other unclassifiable writers who have delved deeply into the complex relationship between life and writing. Through a narrative that is at once direct and voluptuous, Negroni uses the intimate note, the astute observation, the political chronicle, the ballad of exile, and the gloomy song of mourning to write a faithful "census of illegible scenes."
