IMAGE OF ABSENCE

By Jeannette L. Clariond

The Word Works, 2018

Winner of the International Latino Book Award for “Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English”

Third Place Winner of the 2020 Texas Tech President’s Faculty Book Award

“In Image of Absence, Jeannette L. Clariond—the laureate of Mexico’s soul—takes H.D.’s hand and dives head first into the self-same sea which gave us Trilogy, that sea of treacherous silence wherein God’s name lives. With the courage only a mystic dares, Clariond breathes this water into her lungs so she might utter body, its absence; history, her absence; love, her ever-was, speaking sound into silence until it all becomes air. Of course, only the intrepid Curtis Bauer would be the one ready to travel with Clariond into this deep. We needed this book revealed to English; in this time of overwhelming American fear, I needed my chance to share in this uncommon prayer.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse, and translator of Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation

“Reading Image of Absence, how little I know, how deeply at home I feel in Clariond’s intimate strangeness, like finding again a deep friend from another life. I am grateful she offers, in absence, an overnight home place, or a half-hour refuge, waiting for us who wait. I don’t know Spanish, so my gratitude for Curtis Bauer’s translation, and for the blessing of his Translator’s Introduction, is boundless.”
—Jean Valentine, author of Shirt in Heaven and Break the Glass