"Poetry is truth-telling in its most intimate form"
Meet Clara Elena García, author of SEVEN LEGENDARY MONSTERS
Clara Elena García is one of those rare generational talents on the verge of being discovered, but whose work already feels timeless. That was my first thought when I read her poetry collection Seven Legendary Monsters in 2024. The way she writes from the monsters’ perspective is fresh and daring—by far the most exciting poetry collection I’ve come across.
Seven Legendary Monsters is a feminist retelling of Paraguay’s Guaraní creation mythos. Across 67 poems, Clara channels ancestral knowing. These poems do not simply revisit the old stories; they reawaken them. They ask what it means to resist, to remember, to reclaim. And most of all, they remind us that our participation in the eternal duel between good and evil is an active choice.
It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Clara and her work through this interview—a conversation about monsters, culture, and the role of poetry.
What inspired you to first write poetry? Has it always been poetry, or have you written in other styles also?
I started writing poetry in middle school. One of the first poems I remember writing was my own version of the Canterbury Tales (which we read in English class) replacing all the original verses with parodies of our teachers. It could have gone disastrously wrong, but luckily my English teacher had a sense of humor.
He also recognized that I had a talent for writing and encouraged me to submit my work to the New England Young Writer’s Conference (aka Breadloaf) at Middlebury College. I was accepted and spent a week studying with their faculty. I continued to write through high school and beyond, finding an escape from the pains and insecurities of my teenage years through the written word.
In college, I majored in Spanish literature, where I was further mentored by a professor—Dr. Gustavo Arango—who, apart from being a notable Colombian author and poet, had been good friends with Gabriel García Marquez. He continued to encourage my development of poetry in my native language, and introduced me to the works of poets like Borges, Neruda, and Paz, whose styles greatly influenced my first book.
Juego de Palabras, your debut poetry collection, offers a glimpse of the soul through poetry and word play. What inspired this book and what was the process of writing and publication like?
Juego de Palabras (Wordplay) was inspired by an obscure work by Octavio Paz, Nobel prize winning poet from Mexico. The book is called The Monkey Grammarian, and it explores the subjectivity of words and language. Paz’s theory was that words are the basis of life itself, as each word can be uniquely interpreted by the mind of the person who reads them. Therefore, words are both meaningless and the root of all meaning simultaneously.
Once I landed on the idea to use Paz’s ideas to tie together the collection, I built upon his theory—assigning each letter of the alphabet a word and then a poem. I also played with space and form considerably within the book, allowing the words and letters to play across the blank space of the page. The finished book is an abecedarium of my life, if you will, one that has no direct theme or meaning but which may be assigned a new one by each reader as Paz intended.
What resulted is the final work, which was accepted by Valparaiso Ediciones in Spain for publication in 2022 and was released in 2023. I was lucky enough to have been invited by the publishing house to travel to the Madrid Book Fair, one of the biggest book fairs in the world, to launch the book. It was a magical experience, one that only deepened my desire to continue writing poetry.
Publishing this book has also connected me to the Spanish language poetry community in New York City, a network that has been one of the most supportive of my work to date.
Seven Legendary Monsters is rooted in Paraguayan mythology. Was this something you already knew and were inspired to write about? Was there any research involved?
I already knew the stories and myths of the Seven Monsters—they are truly woven into the fabric of Paraguayan society. Almost everyone I know has a story of an encounter with one of them, especially people living in the countryside. Paraguayans are a superstitious people, and the myths are part of their everyday life, influencing their morals and their values and serving as lessons for their children.
While writing the book, I did a deep dive into the flora and fauna of the region, learning about the sacred symbolism of the plants and animals connected with each monster.
I also tried to find other variations of the myths- even translating part of the only real source material—Ñande Ypy Kuéra: Nuestros Antepasados—written over a century ago by the Paraguayan poet Narciso Ramón Colman (better known as Rosicrán) in Guaraní.
Frustratingly, or perhaps significantly in my case, there are very few written accounts of the myths due to the oral storytelling traditions of the Guarani people, which made finding more information on them nearly impossible. It allowed me more room to take creative liberties with the myths, and further deepen their lore. Or at least, that is the hope.
In the end, I gave up and let the monsters tell their own stories through me, abandoning the source material and letting their voices claw their way out of my subconscious. I believe that that’s as it should be. The monsters are, after all, simply reflections of our own humanity (or monstrosity, if you will).
Your work has strong feminist undertones–is this intentional? What is the place of feminism and politics in poetry?
In nearly all world mythology, I think you’ll find the common thread that women often bear the blame and the punishment for the sins of men. Look at Medusa, at Medea, at Circe and at Persephone. Look at Morgan Le Fey, at Isis, at Rhiannon, at Chang’e, at Lilith. The same is true of women in Paraguayan mythology.
When I began writing Seven Legendary Monsters, I only thought to include the stories of the monsters. I quickly realized that the stories were hard to understand without the greater context of how they were born and destroyed. Both Keraná, the Mother of Monsters herself, and Porãsy, the girl who sacrificed herself to vanquish them, play an important role in the understanding of the myths of the monsters themselves.
And as I allowed the monsters to voice their own regrets, anger, fear and sorrow, so too did I let the two women tell their story through me. Their tale is not a happy one, but there is mercy and forgiveness to be found in their mistakes and misgivings. And there are lessons to be learned about the balance of power and the lack thereof that women have faced throughout history.
As for poetry and politics, I firmly believe that poetry is truth-telling in its most intimate form. It makes us reflect on ourselves and our societies. It makes us sit uncomfortably with our emotions. It also serves as a vehicle for historical memory- which in this current political climate is deeply needed.
You write both in Spanish and English, what do the two languages afford you in regard to poetics? Surely there would be a different process/approach to working with the languages. Is one easier than the other?
As a bilingual teacher, reader and writer, I find that I often interject words from either English or Spanish (and Guaraní) into my daily life. I believe it’s part of code-switching that many multilinguals experience in their day-to-day that is both an innate instinct and a perpetual frustration to us all.
Paraguayans also have a word for the mixing of languages that comes from living in a bilingual society–jopará–a word stew if you will. When I write poetry, I hear the words spoken in jopará in my head. That my poetic voice is the same as my spoken one is not a surprise, I suppose. And I find that it often makes the final poem richer, as there are words in Spanish or Guaraní that simply have a deeper or more subtle meaning than the equivalent English word.
How does being a Paraguayan immigrant living in the US–especially in the current political climate–influence you and your work?
If anything, it has spurred me to lean more into my culture and my heritage for inspiration for my writing. I find that Latinos in the US are often grouped into a monolith, which is unfortunate. Each country and culture is too vivid, too complex to be lumped into a single census category or voting bloc.
In light of the current atrocities being faced by Latinos in the US, I have also been using my poetry as both a catharsis and a medium for historical memory, if that makes sense. I know from Latin American history how easily history can be altered or erased. I think that art, and writing in particular, plays a pivotal role in ensuring that events are not forgotten or whitewashed (pun intended) into a more sanitized version of history to suit the whims of the oppressor.
In that regard, I recently had a poem accepted into an anthology about the recent election entitled Anger is a Gift which is coming in August from FlowerSong Press. The collection serves as a vital resource for exploring themes of resilience, dissent, and the channeling of collective anxieties in contemporary American society.
The hope is that the diverse voices within the anthology articulate both the despair and the enduring hope that characterize our present moment, providing rich material for discussions on civic engagement, artistic expression as social commentary, and the power of language in times of political upheaval.
What is your favourite poem in Seven Legendary Monsters?
Oh goodness, that’s a tough question. It depends on the day. But I do love the simplicity of the final poem in the first section–Pokõi. It has the most iconic line in the collection, in my opinion:
“For what is sin but fear of failure?
And what are monsters but men made wrong?”
What are you working on next?
I have three current projects! The first is a children’s book, which my agent currently has out on submission. It’s called Jaci and the Jaguar, and it’s my version of the Paraguayan legend of Yerba Mate.
My second project is called (dis)united: Conversations with Migrant Children, and it is a poetry collection based on my six years working with child refugees and migrants in shelters in New York. It’s timely and very cathartic to write, given what’s happening to immigrants in the US right now.
My third (and most ambitious project) is a YA fantasy novel-in-verse. Half poetry, half prose, it’s an indigenous retelling of Romeo & Juliet loosely based on the Paraguayan legends around the sun, the moon, and the eclipses. I’m about ⅔ done with that one, and it’s my longest and most complex work to date.
Please join us for the virtual launch of Seven Legendary Monsters on August 7. More information & registrations can be found here.