Fire Eater
A Translator's Theology
Chloe Garcia Roberts
2024
poem-essays/lyrical essays,
perfect bound trade paperback, 136 pages, 5" x 7"
ISBN: 978-1-947918-12-2
ABOUT FIRE EATER: A TRANSLATOR'S THEOLOGY
Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology by Chloe Garcia Roberts presents an astonishing collection of poem-essays
that seek to reveal firm footholds and guiding threads to lead readers—and the author herself—though the treacherous
and often ill-lit forests of liminality. In essays covering language worship, translation as sacrament, the allusion of memory,
and more, Garcia Roberts creates a cumulative argument across ten works of intensifying emotional registers:
language is not only a medium for communicating knowledge but is itself a font of understanding.
Churning with boundless heart, thought, and wild desire to plumb the depths of self and spirit in search of geneses,
these essays develop their form through the interplay of memory, etymology, religion, and translation. Collectively, Fire Eater
offers a beacon for spiritual seekers and linguaphiles alike: a divination with the dictionary that is at once an invocation
to unravel the complex knots of our in betweenness and an antidote to our despair.
PRAISE FOR FIRE EATER
There is a light in this book, the light of the spiritual explorer who ventures
into the darkness of her origins accompanied only by her baby, and by her will to know what living is. The book is original, its language brilliant,
its plan fearless, and yes, its intention is theological. Writing a blurb for such a book seems absurd. I hope many readers will come to read it and
not blink before the great light that shines in it. Mary closes or drops her eyes. I am dazzled by finding a new story about birth and seeing it was there all along.
—Fanny Howe
Like a Nuestra Señora Desatanudos—Our Lady of Untying Knots—Chloe Garcia Roberts loosens the tangles
and snarls of origin, trauma, motherhood, and language itself in these stunningly poetic and philosophical essays to reveal the "glinting line of
love" that can pull us back into the fold of belonging when we feel most alone, blown violently by circumstance into the deep, cold ocean of our existence.
It is also this line—nevertheless enmeshed with many other lines and sometimes frayed—that we must let go of, Garcia Roberts wisely tells us,
to watch who we love sail off from the harbor of our protection to become who they are, even when that someone is ourselves.
—Rosa Alcalá, author of YOU
Proceeding by echolocation and echolalia—paths made of echo, of sound and sense—by homonym and synonym,
by etymology (true and false), and pure intuition, Chloe García Roberts tracks the twining and twinning of time and experience. A memoir as a
meditation, or a philosophical tract, that orbits in locked grooves in-and-out of phase, like a looped track of déjà vus, through migration and translation,
birth and re-birth, love and un-love, to “harbor, hold, and keep” us in the wound-up, wounded present—not yet past and already running to the future.
The swirling currents of this book will pull you into the wilderness and carry you back into the fold.
—Matvei Yankelevich
