Reconstruction of the Father and Other Writings

"the author is out there, waiting in the trench, writing from the trench, hiding in plain sight like a sniper who observes patiently from afar to kill and survive another day."

- Cayo Cæctus

"I like to write as a man", Iris Kiya told me: "I have never written otherwise." Therefore, in her new work she embarks on a classical territory of the male gaze in literature -the search for the father-, and she does it in a peculiar and subtle way: subversive, for sure, throwing herself freely into the maze of mirrors, but without giving in to the temptation of a simple iconoclasm. In her Reconstruction of the Father, Iris Kiya opens the way to that whirl through a narrator named Milton Steiner, which is one of several male aliases she employs in her writing. The father that this narrator is reconstructing seems to be aware that the illusion of his presence comes at the cost of death.

- Michael Ebmeyer

Using a series of male aliases/heteronyms, Iris Kiya delves into the memory of soldiers at war, children at play and lovers in crisis. Evoking everything that comes into sight, from images of carrousels and photographs by Robert Capa, to the smell of toasted oats and pepper, Iris Kiya traces the inherent violence of images and their effects on subjects, armed with a rich poetic imagery and a broad palette of affections. She assures us: "My trips are not imaginary, I carry them on the tip of my tongue".

This dual-language edition, the first of Iris Kiya's works translated into English, compiles three poetry collections: Reconstruction of the Father (2020), Massacre in Harrington Street (2017) and Infrared Margins (2019). This anthology promises to be a most generous introduction for English speaking audiences to the work of one of the most celebrated Bolivian female poets of the last decade.