Eliana  Hernández Pachón

The Brush
Archipelago Books, 2024





Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

Short-listed for the National Translation Award 
in Poetry 2025

Named one of 2024’s 10 best books of the year 
by The Atlantic
“The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández Pachón’s poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square. The Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.”
Praise

“Stunning, painful, beautiful, horrible, human, and full of abundant throbbing language.”

—Jessica Rankin
“The Brush is marked by a startling lyricism while delivering a gut-punch. This book-long sequence of poems recounts a massacre in El Salado, in the Colombian countryside, where paramilitaries killed sixty people. The deliberate, predatory momentum of the text draws on the intimate everyday lives and enduring love of the people who survived and those who did not. Nature itself has a voice in this ecopoetic book, where the brush also witnesses the brutality and relates the tale. Hernández-Pachón has accomplished a tour de force by representing atrocity with care and vividness. Robin Myer’s lyrical translation is indelible, haunting.”

— Judges National Translation Award in Poetry 2025
“In Myers’s limpid translation, The Brush feels like a fresh discovery thanks to its narrative range, which insists on exploring both an intimate relationship that’s wrenched apart and the much larger ecosystem in which the separation occurs. Hernández-Pachón, the youngest winner of Colombia’s national poetry prize, captures a community ruptured by violence, exemplified by two lovers caught in its churn.”

— The Atlantic's Ten Best Books of the Year
“A disconcerting calmness rests over this book-length sequence of poems that, in a mere 57 pages, manages to capture the contradictions and harmonies that arise in response to acts of extreme violence. That calmness serves to unsettle the reader and honour the survivors, while placing this event within a wider ecosystem and granting a voice to nature, the one force, perhaps, that can truly offer both understanding and healing.”

— Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
“For a poet writing about a catastrophe, using artifice to generate pathos can be difficult, as the reader knows that the events in the book are true. Hernández-Pachón resolves this by animating the forest, who is a compassionate observer, with a distinct persona and all the eccentricities of being a speaking-forest. “During the concert, / rain is generality. / Every I and every mine / is open sky or moss.’”

—Janani Ambikapathy, Poetry Foundation.

Reviews
&
Interviews
Harvard Review
The Brush
Los Angeles Review of Books
Integral Witness
Poetry Foundation 
The Brush, by  Janani Ambikapathy
Circumference
The Brush
World Literature Today
The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón
Roughghosts

 After the night, day breaks
Poetry Nation ReviewOn Eliana Hernández-Pachón and Javier Peñalosa M.
Previous book
about
2026
instagram