“It seemed as if everything was coming to an end,” writes Marosa di Giorgio in the first section of Carnation and Tenebrae Candle, preparing the reader for the wondrous and terrifying world of contradictions that will follow: a lush countryside filled with enormous hares and enchanted begonias, meals of rats and apples as well as a “wheat field of stars,” where readers must constantly renegotiate the borders between the inanimate and the living, the living and the dead. Even the most familiar relations transform until a father becomes the “Chosen One” as well as “an Oak Tree of Fine Understanding,” and a mother can be both savior to and the victim of her daughter. There are ghosts and “war storms,” rapes and resurrections in a location both unmappable and as recognizable as the first prayers whispered from the mouth of a child who cannot possibly understand them. But there’s nothing naïve about di Giorgio’s work, and no other voice that sounds quite like hers. “[J]ust as I was walking among the eucalyptus apothecaries, at that time when the walls become filled with stars”, di Giorgio writes, “I saw the language, and I immediately understood it, as if it had always been my own.” Jeannine Marie Pitas’s English translations have helped bring this Uruguayan writer to a new audience. Carnation and Tenebrae Candle will continue to solidify di Giorgio as a major voice from Latin America.—Susan Briante