Records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1990). This offers an anguished response to Chile's violent history.

“As citizens of the United States of 'America,' we have most recently in our national election responded to an horrific chapter in our nation's history. But there remain other wicked events for which we have yet to answer. Certainly U.S. complicity in the evil that befell Chile on September 11 (1973) is one of them. In Purgatory, Zurita's bleak but searching poem, the poet shares with us his struggles to reconnect to his humanity. We should be grateful for Anna Deeny's translation and afterword, and for bringing Zurita to us.”—David Bonior, Chair, American Rights at Work[praise for Anteparadise, translated by Jack Schmitt]“Chile's tragic recent history provides the fire in which this young poet's Dantean visions have been forged. The poetry that emerges is by turns cold, molten, scathing, and ultimately liberating—a remarkable thing.”—John Ashbery“Zurita's sequence of poems—and they must be read as a sequence—creates as it explores a geography of earth, body, and soul, a syntax of pain and topology, an imagery of flesh and land painfully entwined, ultimately freed in joyful pastoral. . . . This is ground-breaking, mind-breaking, bone-breaking style; the miracle is that Zurita heals all by the end, wringing triumph out of anguish.”—Ronald Christ

"An exciting literary event." Publishers Weekly "Important and dynamic... Every young poet ... needs to read and study this book. The lessons found here will redefine poetic commitment." The Bloomsbury Review "Zurita is seen by many to be the most important poet in Chile and the inheritor of Neruda's legacy... An important book." Poetry Foundation/ Harriet "Beautifully produced, well translated, and as lyrically chilling as when it was first written in the shadow of Pinochet's ... dictatorship." Molossus