Poems
Translations by the 4W International Women Collective Translation Circle
Photographs by Wilfried Raussert
Note of the Author
Sometimes the world seems turned upside down. So many beings, both human and other than human, long for freedom yet live in various kinds of cages. So many long for tenderness yet are pierced with pain. In a world of increasing technological surveillance and catastrophic climate change, we grieve for our children’s inheritance. Yet as always, as these poems and photos reveal, there is beauty, creativity, mystery, on a pilgrimage every step of which is filled with both endurance and the holy.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poetry is Paradise Is Jagged. With Laura-Gray Street she is coediting Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (forthcoming 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and elsewhere. She has received several awards for her poetry, among them the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi. Her current book project is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, a poetry/photography project with Wilfried Raussert, with translations of the poems into Spanish by the 4W/Women in Translation collective.
The 4W International Women Collective Translation Circle at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (4W-WIT) convenes scholars from across disciplines and institutions as part of a collaborative translation praxis. It aims to make texts and related ideas that are only available in Spanish also accessible in English—and vice versa—to benefit writers and readers around the world. This project was completed by 4W-WIT Circle team members include the writers and translators: Beatriz L. Botero (Colombia/USA), Lori DiPrete Brown (USA), Juan F. Egea (Spain/US), Silvia Goldman (Uruguay/USA), Olmanda Hernández Guerrero (Venezuela/USA), Vicente M. López Abad (Spain), Sarli E. Mercado (Nicaragua/USA), Sally Perret (USA), and Ulises Zarazúa (México).
Wilfried Raussert is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and scholar of North American and InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is Head of the Cultural Studies Department at Bielefeld University. Currently he acts as Director of Research and Transfer at the CALAS Maria Sybilla Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (Bielefeld-Guadalajara) conducting various photo exhibitions in Guadalajara and Mexico City in 2025. As singer songwriter he released two new compositions in 2024: Shine a Light https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/album/2IaGH65IgAYSkdhmtiVKHb and Song for Lilith https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/track/2Prp9H3IrC0I9z3tshq47H