Nidia's Reviews > Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

Don’t let this slim volume fool you, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country is filled with poetic depth, visiting and living with the pain of bodies across Mexico’s history. What does it mean to be a body in pain? What is the place of grieving when that pain is as new as it is old? What does art, writing in particular, do in that process? These are just some of the questions that Garza contends with in this book.

Garza captivated me from the very first page, before I know it I was over forty pages in and underlining, note taking, pausing to let her words soak into my head and heart. Garza beautifully, intimately speaks to the heart of the reader, pulling from them the emotions of her subjects: the very real people who live with the very real pain inflicted upon them by a government that stopped caring for them long ago. On the other side of that she also displays their strength, their resilience, their hope that their fight will mean a future without that pain for the next generation.

This is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a long time. It has made me reconsider my experiences/perceptions with Mexico, and made me realize how little I really know, especially about events in more recent history.