Escrito a lo largo de trece años, Mi libro madre, mi libro monstruo es una tierna e inquietante reflexión de Kate Zambreno sobre la capacidad de la escritura, la fotografía y la memoria para abrazar las sombras cuando nos encontramos en medio de una crisis. Un libro a la vez primitivo y cuidadosamente esculpido, que traza una búsqueda incesante por registrar las raíces y los relatos apócrifos familiares después de la muerte de la madre. El texto se ramifica en una anatomía fracturada de la melancolía que incluye pensamientos críticos a modo de apuntes de Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, entre otros, que la autora logra integrar en la propia vivencia, aunando así autobiografía, dolor e infancia con la sensación de hacernos entrar en un espacio sagrado.
"Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's book ... is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes, and dead calm, of grief. The book ... is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's "Cells" sculptures--at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater." -- publisher's website.
