Book Cover

Don’t Come Back

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

277 pp. 6 x 9
38 b&w photographs
Pub Date: January 13, 2017

Subjects: Creative Nonfiction

Series: 21st Century Essays

Add paperback to Cart $22.95  ISBN: 978-0-8142-5395-3
Add PDF Ebook to Cart $22.95  ISBN: 978-0-8142-7488-0

In this collection of linked lyrical and narrative essays, experimental translations, and reinterpreted myths, 2016 Rona Jaffe award winner Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas launches into an exploration of home and identity, family history and belonging, continually examining what it means to feel familiarity but never really feel at home.

Don’t Come Back intermixes translations of Spanish adages and adaptations of major Colombian myths with personal essays about growing up amidst violence, magic, and an unyielding Andean sun. Home is place and time and people and language and history, and none of these are ever set in stone. Attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable and translate the untranslatable—to move smoothly and cohesively between culture, language, and place—Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is torn between spaces, between the aunt who begs her to return to Colombia and the mother who tells her, “There’s nothing here for you, Lina. Don’t come back.” Don’t Come Back is an exploration of home and identity that constantly asks, “If you really could go back, would you?”

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is author of Drown/Sever/Sing and Visiting Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. She is a recipient of the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.

Author Photo

Contents

    Acknowledgments
    Dead Mouse Prelude
           
I.  CHIMINIGAGUA
    BOG-MIA-CID
    After the Colonel
    Catching Moths
    María, María, María, María
    El Coco
    Tinfoil Astronaut

II.  BACHUÉ
    Aurelia
    Rueda
    Tenjano
    A Dry Tree
    Caraba

III.  NEMQUETEBA
    The Peach Orchard
    Practice
    Drowning Lessons
    Lamia
    Epigraphist
    Burn

IV.  HUITACA
    The First Jaime
    Thinking It Was Something You Could Hunt and Kill
    Empire of Toes
    The Death and Burial of Concepción Dolores
    Pain Pays the Income of Each Precious Thing
    CID-LAX-BOG

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