A Review of Bodies Found in Various Places

Bodies Found in Various Places by Elvira Hernández (Cardboard House Press, 2025)

Only recently has her work moved from the margins to broader recognition, thanks to the Jorge Teillier and Pablo Neruda prizes in 2018, and Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2024. Bodies Found in Various Places collects works written between 1981 and 2018 and is particularly significant for U.S. readers, as only one of her books, The Chilean Flag, had been previously published in English. By consolidating multiple titles across decades into a single bilingual volume, Cardboard House Press has turned a previously scattered record into a usable canon for readers and classrooms.

While it would be disingenuous to examine four decades of poetry with a single lens, two constants run through the six books gathered here. First, the practice of working from the margins to reveal what is hidden, which aligns with Hernández’s own “ethics of invisibility,” cultivating a gaze that notices what the powers try to hide. And second, a sustained exploration of the conflict between the individual and the state, be it under the hard oppressions of dictatorship or within the soft disciplines of late capitalism, tracing how power marks bodies and the places they inhabit.

The first book in the anthology, The Chilean Flag, written in 1981 after her imprisonment by Pinochet’s forces, was initially read and circulated as photocopies, which gives the work an epic aura and embodies Hernández’s marginal and oppositional stances. The book is a series of poems in which the flag is transformed into a violated, speechless female body. The first poem sets the tone bluntly: “The Chilean flag / is not dedicated to anyone / she surrenders to whomever / knows how to take her.” Here, the flag, personified as a female body politic, is subject to assault by whoever wields force. From here on, the poems build on a body-metaphor that grows deliberately abject to undercut patriotic sheen: “The Chilean Flag is hung between two buildings / her fabric swells like an ulcerated belly—falls like / an old tit….” The grotesque similes force the reader to confront perhaps what the official image edits out and to recognize how the nation’s rhetoric of strength is often draped over exhausted and brutalized flesh: “In square meters the Chilean Flag is measured / its odor with twitches of the nose… / the constructions of malnourished trust.”

The two final poems of the book reveal the regime’s ultimate intention: to mute dissent. “The Chilean Flag is used as a gag / and that’s why surely that’s why / no one says anything,” announces the penultimate poem, in which the flag is cast as both a literal instrument of torture and a symbolic reminder that dissent is treason. This culminates in the last poem, where: “The Chilean Flag declares / two points / her silence.” Even though the book ends in defeat, in an enforced silence, The Chilean Flag’s paratext (the story of how the book survived) reminds us that Hernández refused it, finding ways to persevere outside official conduits.

If The Chilean Flag used metaphor to speak about the oppressions of the dictatorship, embodying the nation as a glorious banner-turned female that is simultaneously beaten, starved and often “cast to her fate”, the next book, Bodies Found in Various Places, which lends the anthology its title, addresses the physical obliteration of the individual victim and the sites where their remains were left. The series of five poems details the discovery of remains in the country’s most marginalized spaces, portraying shocking, fragmented scenes such as finding “something larvated in Juan’s head / in the garbage dump of Buin.” In this short book, Hernández employs a stark, almost archaeological approach to force these crimes into historical record. Poem 4, perhaps my favorite poem in the whole anthology, achieves this through a powerful juxtaposition, first listing ancient findings like the “Java Man dressed as animal” and “horses in the cave of Altamira,” among other discoveries.

This catalogue of deep history is instantly shattered by the discovery of contemporary political victims, whose remains are described: “in the caverns of Calama the viscera lie in the dust of another / civilization.” By placing the total material destruction of the individual, reduced to scattered “viscera,” alongside well-known historical relics, the poet implies that the state’s violence violently ended the contemporary, civilized framework of the nation, leaving behind fragments of a disaster that require archaeological effort to be recognized.

Following the physical confrontation with the disappeared body, the next book, Giddy up, Halley! (written and published in 1986) shifts focus to a new form of state and economic oppression: the erasure of individual perception under the emerging neoliberal model. The comet’s arrival becomes the central metaphor for a transcendent moment utterly missed by a society crippled by authoritarianism and grinding labor. The poetic voice confesses: “I did not see it,” explaining that she was too “consumed by working overtime and more work earning and re-earning money and making / hard cash so the world would keep existing for me,” noting that “the gravitational force of earthly matters did not allow me to lift my gaze / to the stars.” The comet itself, the event, appears as a symbol of the dictatorship’s ongoing, spectral threat, “like a decapitated head appearing and never wanting to disappear.” However, this presence is ultimately a commercialized and mediated spectacle (“rejuvenated on every screen by the intense advertising”), in a phenomenon reminiscent of Baudrillard’s hyperreality and that perhaps anticipates the postmodern, neoliberal realities of a post-dictatorship landscape.

Corporal Punishment (written between 1983 and 1987, but published in 2018) connects state violence with the anxieties of the new neoliberal reality, touched upon Giddy up, Halley!. The book portrays how the state and the economy impose punishment upon the body and blends this systemic abuse with religious undertones that challenge the dictatorship’s political-theological justifications. The book starts with a long poem, “DIVINE PLAN,” written in the form of a prayer and where the poetic voice challenges a higher authority that oversees the exploitation, declaring: “You incriminated yourself with us, Lord … your robotics has a limit, your credit anxiety / -the Master Card.” This spiritual and economic condemnation extends to the complete erasure of the individual, leading the poetic voice to demand the reclamation of the physical self: “Give us back the body, Sir, renounce that spirituality those / profits / the horrifying genetics of making us human / and erasing us.” In this regime, the body is stripped of spiritual comfort while simultaneously commodified and attacked, and identity appears to be defined by new economic markers of success: “[m]ore important than having a mother is having a manager / to be part of a team.” The poetic voice identifies with those who suffer or are left behind in this regime: “I put myself up for rent / at night the newspapers cover my corpse / at night I’m covered with vagabonds.” Here the poetic voice appears as a commodified “corpse” put “up for rent” under economic exploitation, merging the ultimate erasure of state violence (“newspapers cover my corpse”) with the reality of marginal existence, hosting the “vagabonds.”

The next book in the anthology, Santiago Waria (written between 1989 and 1991 and published in 1992) documents a difficult period of transition, after the end of the Pinochet regime, and focuses on the capital city, which is referred to by its indigenous name, Waria. The book appears to oppose any political push toward forgetting the violence, insisting that “20 years of our lives were lost.” The poetic voice highlights the enduring material horror, noting that the military “trooper went bowling with our bones” and condemned victims “to walk down the morgue street that is Avenida La Paz.” Each poem in the book starts with a letter of the alphabet, a structure that perhaps points out at the difficulty of communicating amidst the trauma: “we haven’t passed beyond the level of the alphabet.” In defiance of the pressure to move on, the poetic voice positions herself as the marginalized chronicler determined to preserve the past, embracing the persona: “Yo, Elvira Hernández, the one of the bard death rattle, the / one that has no place no contacts in the Court, the one / that would have to disappear.”

This commitment to marginality and refusal to conform is challenged in the final poem, where a communiqué orders the poet to “abandon the armament” because “The Resistance has foundered” and the “Theorists of Marginality are in the Nomenklatura.” The poet is urged to “fit in and sign the peace treaty” to receive “no trouble on the Righthand of God.” In direct defiance of this mandate to conform and forget, the book closes with the poet’s final statement of continued political resistance: “My weapons are my life / Hernández”

The last book is From Birds From My Window (published in 2018). The collection marks a significant shift, moving the poetic gaze from the violent urban and political landscapes of previous books to something the translators have called in their introduction, a “poetics of ornithography.” There is a quieter mood in these poems and a definitive ecological ethos. Hernández registers loss caused by human intervention and development. The poetic voice mourns the absence of the dragonflies “that covered the windshields / in the seventies” and the lapwings whose nests are taken over by “[e]lectric mowers / garden lights / dogs that come down from the apartment building to pee.” Ultimately, the book frames the poet’s work as a difficult, conscious choice to persist by embracing change (“We should transform ourselves … / Once upon a time we were dinosaurs”) even while acknowledging the cost (“I lost a bunch of feathers and / some teeth.”) Amidst the loss and devastation, though, Hernández still manages to find quiet moments of reflection and resistance: “It is a great pleasure / to contemplate / an empty cage.”

The six works gathered in this anthology trace a compelling arc through four decades of poetry that show Elvira Hernández’s singular commitment to chronicling oppression from the marginalized perspective that defines her “ethics of invisibility.” Readers who enter this volume are introduced to the full range of a poet whose work, written between 1981 and 2018, is finally receiving recognition in her home country. This Cardboard House Press edition serves as an accessible introduction and, at the same time, a definitive bilingual reference. Borzutzky and Schumacher have accomplished a heroic task in rendering Hernández’s complex voice and shifting registers, even if the raw, idiomatic edge of her Chileaness is occasionally smoothed over in the transition to English. While her poetry is deeply rooted in the specific time and space of Chile, particularly during and after the dictatorship, the topics it addresses transcend local concerns, speaking to the mechanics of power and to the civic work of resisting erasure.

Vicent Moreno is Chair of the Department of English, Philosophy, and World Languages at Arkansas State University.

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