By Jorge Teillier. Edited and translated by Sebastián Gómez Matus, Sonnet Phelps.
A brand-new selection of poems from the under-translated ecological visionary, Jorge Teillier
Though he is widely read and reprinted throughout Latin America, the Chilean poet Jorge Teillier is rarely translated into English, and his significance as an ecological thinker is radically underestimated both in Chile and abroad. This brand-new selection of poems establishes Teillier as a visionary ecological thinker, a vital link in a lineage of earth-based poetics traceable through Gabriela Mistral to Rainer Maria Rilke’s mystical poetics of the hearth. In plain language, Teillier’s poems access an essential aliveness that dissolves boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic. One of few major poets to remain in Chile during Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, Teillier bore witness to the breakdown of society as he knew it. As the US undergoes its own unraveling, Teillier’s poems offer guidance for living, as he puts it, at “the end of the world.” Jorge Teillier (1935–96) was a central figure of Chile’s Generación del 50. Though he received high praise from contemporaries such as Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño, critical recognition of his work was muted during his lifetime. He died in 1996, and is buried in La Ligua under a gravestone that reads simply “Poet.”
STATUS: Forthcoming | 11/24/2026
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Published by The Song Cave. By Jorge Teillier. Edited and translated by Sebastián Gómez Matus, Sonnet Phelps.
A brand-new selection of poems from the under-translated ecological visionary, Jorge Teillier
Though he is widely read and reprinted throughout Latin America, the Chilean poet Jorge Teillier is rarely translated into English, and his significance as an ecological thinker is radically underestimated both in Chile and abroad. This brand-new selection of poems establishes Teillier as a visionary ecological thinker, a vital link in a lineage of earth-based poetics traceable through Gabriela Mistral to Rainer Maria Rilke’s mystical poetics of the hearth. In plain language, Teillier’s poems access an essential aliveness that dissolves boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the organic and the inorganic. One of few major poets to remain in Chile during Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, Teillier bore witness to the breakdown of society as he knew it. As the US undergoes its own unraveling, Teillier’s poems offer guidance for living, as he puts it, at “the end of the world.” Jorge Teillier (1935–96) was a central figure of Chile’s Generación del 50. Though he received high praise from contemporaries such as Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño, critical recognition of his work was muted during his lifetime. He died in 1996, and is buried in La Ligua under a gravestone that reads simply “Poet.”
