Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence

"Aridjis’ work casts a beguiling spell that blurs the line between dreaming and waking." -- Chard deNiord - Harvard Review
"Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence brings poet-translator George McWhirter’s adept English to the service of a great world-poet, Homero Aridjis. The book’s enchanting variety of tones and subjects expresses a rounded human being engaged with our total experience, from the familial to the political, from bodily sensations to dream, vision, philosophic thought, and history, from hope to foreboding. A keynote is the sense of a person speaking with us plainly and yet from kinship with a light that bathes, and springs from, each thing." -- judges’ citation, 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize
"In his vast oeuvre, Aridjis has produced many works that confront apocalyptic times." -- Carlos Fonseca - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door into the light." -- Seamus Heaney
"Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, which includes selections from Aridjis’s four most recent collections, along with previously unpublished poetry, is a significant addition to an already important body of work.... The collection’s title poem will likely endure as one of the great gems that the now 82-year-old Aridjis produced in his late period. It’s simultaneously philosophical and surreal but nonetheless retains an intense sensuality and presence of being that anchors it in earthly realities." -- André Naffis-Sahely
"Aridjis is a poet of great vitality and originality." -- W. S. Merwin
"A great flame passes through the words, the poetry, of Homero Aridjis, who sets reality alight in images that at once illuminate and consume it, making life a sister of dream. Homero is a great poet; our century has great need of him." -- Yves Bonnefoy