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El silencio de las hormigas
Amarilis Tavárez-Vales

Miriam Damaris Mardivino and the front cover of her book, Enraizada.
Amarilis Tavárez-Vales’s poetry collection, El silencio de las hormigas, pulses beneath the quietude of its title, delivering a piercing exploration of vulnerability and resilience without ever falling prey to predictable descriptions. Tavárez’s poetic voice navigates her body as both an antagonistic landscape and a fragile vessel of revelation, with the forceful authenticity that emerges only from the most intimate pain.

The collection opens with "Manifiesto," a candid admission of relentless thirst—not simply a thirst for forgiveness, but for reclamation, for self-realization amid inherited sorrows. Tavárez-Vales writes: "Hoy descubrí que Dios es como el eco de una hormiga," redefining divinity as an almost imperceptible whisper, infinitely minute yet persistent. Through such imagery, Tavárez dissects the ceaseless inner turbulence that marks human fragility.
The poems depicting her precarious health, such as "Irme" and "Fe," magnify this internal conflict into stark immediacy. The poet's visceral descriptions, "Tengo sed, digo, pero nada me humedece la garganta", capture the isolation and helplessness of physical deterioration. Tavárez channels the metallic precision of medical interventions—needles as cold saviors, metal as a promise—juxtaposed against a deep yearning for something softer, warmer, more lasting. In "Carne," Tavárez-Vales portrays her body as earth, an island "poblada de pozos diminutos" murmuring exhaustion. Her imagery is disturbingly precise; the body's interior landscape is tilled, sown with discomfort and tentative healing, an endless ritual of intrusion and relief. Such lines haunt the reader, embedding themselves like the "dientes filosos" she evokes, cutting deeper with each revisitation.

Tavárez-Vales’s lyrical bravery resists easy definitions, frames poetry itself as a coffin: beautiful, deceptively simple vessels containing the essence of a life. The poet questions this containment: "¿Somos tesoros? ¿Qué pretendo guardar en los poemas?" El silencio de las hormigas thrives in the quiet volatility that emerges from eyes that see clearly through the body’s ache, it maps the intricate terrain of human fragility, carving out spaces of contemplation and emotional confrontation through a poetics of striking honesty and unguarded introspection.
Amarilis Tavárez-Vales was born in Camuy, Puerto Rico, in November 1974. She holds degrees in sociology and psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She has been published in Guasábara (1997), El sótano 00931 (2001), Letras salvajes (2006), Prometeo digital (2005), and Taller literario (2006). 
El silencio de las hormigas is a publication by Trabalis Editores.
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PURCHASE
Rossy E. Lima
Reviwed by
Rossy E. Lima
5/22/2025
Rossy Evelin Lima, PhD, is an award-winning writer, scholar, and translator. She has shared her journey as a writer through a TEDx talk and a nationally broadcasted PBS documentary. Her poetry has been set to music and performed at venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She was named Poet of the Year by The Americas Poetry Festival of New York (2018) and has received multiple awards and recognitions in Italy, Mexico, and the U.S.
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