“In Myers’s limpid translation, The Brush feels like a fresh discovery thanks to its narrative range, which insists on exploring both an intimate relationship that’s wrenched apart and the much larger ecosystem in which the separation occurs. Hernández-Pachón, the youngest winner of Colombia’s national poetry prize, captures a community ruptured by violence, exemplified by two lovers caught in its churn.”
—The Atlantic’s Ten Best Books of the Year
“The narrative unfolds at a slant via three acts . . . in a tone that is at once factual and filled with palpable dread . . . For a poet writing about a catastrophe, using artifice to generate pathos can be difficult, as the reader knows that the events in the book are true. Hernández-Pachón resolves this by animating the forest, who is a compassionate observer, with a distinct persona and all the eccentricities of being a speaking-forest. ‘During the concert, / rain is generality. / Every I and every mine / is open sky or moss.'” –– Janani Ambikapathi, Harriet Books
“Powerful and devastating . . . Every word makes a massive impact in this slim, arresting poem.” – Emily Tarr, Southern Bookseller Review
“This poignant account of the tragedy still resonates powerfully today, more than two decades after it occurred. ‘When what happened happened and they made us watch, it was as if Earth revolved around our eyes, as if space opened up between our eyes, as if lava flow erupted from within.’ Breathtaking.” — Leo Boix, Morning Star
“Flowers, bleeding bodies, and all that blooms from itself—we need poetry that sends us directly into this blossoming in all its agony, horror, and beauty. Eliana Hernández-Pachón has given us this with The Brush, a book I want everyone I know to know about.” — CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return and You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis
“‘I want to tell you’ says an unnamed woman traveling with Ester in The Brush, but the desire to name horror struggles against the need to survive it. Hernández-Pachón’s words at turns circle, allude, describe and pulse with the events and legacy of the massacre at El Salado. This book is stunning, painful, beautiful, horrible, human and full of abundant, rich, throbbing language.” — Jessica Rankin
“A disconcerting calmness rests over this book-length sequence of poems that, in a mere 57 pages, manages to capture the contradictions and harmonies that arise in response to acts of extreme violence. That calmness serves to unsettle the reader and honour the survivors, while placing this event within a wider ecosystem and granting a voice to nature, the one force, perhaps, that can truly offer both understanding and healing.” –– Joseph Shreiber, Rough Ghosts
“There is something that literature can do and do very well, and that is act as witness, offering a way to document and acknowledge, to process, and The Brush shines a spotlight on Colombian history perhaps little known across North America, writing on what can’t be imagined, but an event that leaves its scar across not only history, but on the lives of those that remain . . . This is a powerful and evocative collection, devastating for its subtlety, and composed with enormous care and unflinching gaze.” –– Rob McLennan
“What emerges in The Brush . . . is instruction in the practice of bearing witness, of honoring the dead. Rather than the clinical language of the Investigators, the Brush-as-witness offers: ‘For those who came back: / a handful of totumo blossoms, piñuelas with their tender pulp, their starry white tomentum.'”–– Renee Hudson, Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Brush is a single narrative in three sections of poetry, each with a different point of view: Pablo, Ester, and The Brush. As a whole, the triptych creates a realm that simultaneously feels like fairy tale and current events—in the sense that horror abides in each. That the forest speaks adds wonder and fever. The quiet tone makes the Colombian massacre even more terrifying.”
—Kimiko Hahn, World Literature Today
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