Sara Uribe

Introduction

Sara Uribe first came to widespread notice with her collection Antígona González, in which she uses the myth of Antigone as a poetic metaphor to draw attention to the growing number of missing persons in Mexico (90,000 people have disappeared without trace, and their numbers continue to rise). Like Antigone, Antígona Gozález is desperately seeking her missing brother. While this years Poetry International Festival delves into the poetic body, Uribe's poignant poems enable us to feel what it means when there is suddenly no body there. Since she is unable to tell the story of the missing persons, Uribe tells the story of the tirelessly searching loved ones who remain behind. In the midst of atrocities and despair, Antígona González offers hope by naming the disappeared, giving them a place to exist in her beautiful but harrowing poems, albeit it only as a memory: ”As if written by the Emily Dickinson of Tamaulipas (…) it is that intimate, honest, unaffected, intelligent, urgent, innovative, spare, and beautiful.” (Francisco Goldman)