Pérez Díaz’s dazzling poem stretches the borders between languages and histories, unearthing a chasm that challenges the colonial forces behind its eruption. Through this opening, we glimpse cadences of possible trajectories. The wounds of colonialism cut across words, exposing a vast and jutting landscape. Searching for new verbs, the poet drags language into the mud of immanence, crafting a linguistic metamorphosis that forges fresh names for limbs and elegy, for grasses and island. This book hypnotically possesses the reader, disclosing the past as projected images of a future prefigured in the first canto of an unfinished Spanish epic, born from the erotic union of Ramos Otero and Whitman.
—Isabel Sobral Campos

In poems that fruit and wither, fade and flower, moving gracefully between the bareness of spare and nominal English to the verdant verb-centric dynamism of Spanish, From the Founding of the Country is a history of how the one nourishes the other and the other destroys the one, and so it begins, over and over again. It is a history of lives split into their dual elements, self and other, near and far, here and there, continent and island, landscape and state, victim and oppressor, lover and lover. But above all it is a history of love, love the center of this unmaking and making, love which by the strength of its presence or its absence is the creative force that shapes the world. Its spark is life, its dearth is death. This book is both imperative and an imperative. Or, in the words of Peréz Díaz, “our verbs are depleted, the sea is rising / this is the poem and this is the time!”
—Chloe García Roberts

It is hard to believe that this is Cristina Pérez Díaz’s first poetry collection. The confidence, intensity, playfulness and timelessness of these poems suggest a maturity that can only come from the experience of reading. Channeling literary giants like Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and Manuel Ramos Otero, Pérez Díaz has written a stunning love letter to her country, Puerto Rico, a place full of contradictions and mirages that she can spot from up close, but also from the distance that only the meticulous study of literature can provide.
—Margarita Pintado Burgos

Cristina Pérez Díaz’s lyric poetry has the tremendous gift of simplicity and rigor, because it concerns an extraordinary state of exception where there is no space for adjectives, only for verbs and nouns. Sung here is the love of two bodies in absolute proximity and the country of two they are founding. Each verse is a limb, an autonomous whole, separated from the following as by an anatomical knife, as if it were the articulation of a body to be shared after a sacrifice. The miracle, spreading joy or sadness, sometimes irony, is born in the scar of the incision, on the wound of union.
—Phoebe Giannisi

Imagine an impossible and anachronistic love between two poets, cult figures within their respective traditions. Now make it sapphic and experimental, now make it testimonial and political. Give this love conversation, depth, and intimacy. Only in literature can this impossible love found a country. From the Founding of the Country explores and plays with the idea of founding a territory to which only poetry can give language. With striking mastery, Pérez Díaz’s debut takes us through intimate and political expeditions that challenge our understanding of language, territory (which might as well be the same as translation), and human relationships. Her poetic voice, always in motion, becomes a ship, a captain, and a lighthouse. This book not only asks essential questions—We need a new verb, what would it be?—but also finds answers in a unique musicality. It is a transatlantic book, unafraid of the posterity awaiting one of the finest contemporary poets.
—Mara Pastor

This debut collection by the Puerto Rican poet and translator examines the legacies of colonialism and violence in Puerto Rico from the viewpoint of a writer who started the book in New York and completed it in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The expansive poems further explore the fundamental complexities of the island and its history, assessing its numerous impacts on individual bodies and communities. … A captivating book by a new voice in Latin American poetry.
—Leo Boix, “Letters from Latin America,” Morning Star

What is sovereignty if not a form of love? What is translation if not a navigation of other ways of knowing and being? In From the Founding of the Country, Cristina Pérez Díaz translates Manuel Ramos Otero as landscape and affect, a feeling of floating, of being driven by ocean, of launching and becoming airborne, or ocean borne. … Cristina Pérez Díaz brings English speaking readers a taste of Manuel Ramos Otero’s unique voice and also her own singular forms of language and sovereignty, introducing necessary voices and also relationships between English and Spanish.
—LynleyShimat Lys, ANMLY