Exiliana: Poems
Mariela Griffor
Luna Publications
In her collection of poetry, Exiliana, Mariela Griffor expresses her innermost thoughts in words that are not of her mother tongue. In rich, beautiful, passionate verse, Griffor presents a documentary of her experiences of devastation and loss, reflecting on the casualties—both mortal and emotional—of civil unrest.
Griffor experienced first the loss of her fiancé, and subsequently the loss of her home and country, when she took flight out of Chile to escape arrest. Twenty-four and pregnant, she took haven in Sweden, a land of cold and endless nights, where she was left to ponder the “what-ifs” of an abruptly aborted romance, the welfare of her family and friends, the fate of her compatriots, and the land of mountains and eucalyptus she had always known as home. Even in the privileged and exclusive community of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, which she now calls home, Griffor’s heart and soul remain in exile.
Rainelle Burton has called Exiliana, “An incredibly powerful and complex journey beyond the window of exile into the depths of the experience. Exiliana is brilliant and maddening in its uncensored truth aobut love and death, war and life—brilliant in the richness and detail that can only come from a mind rare enough to focus on both the war—torn graves of Latin American and the politics of thrown-away pink sofas on the streets of Detroit, maddening in the way it forces us to continuously question the reality of our own lives. This is a significant work by any standard.”
Mariela Griffor is co-founder of the Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States.