Bold and biting, /CUTS redefines what the novella is and what it can do, opening new doors of possibility. At its heart is Columbian protagonist Lucia Nieto's secret struggle with addiction-her father's and her own. Having relocated to Madrid, Lucia breaks down, each splinter of her identity and self, creating multi-faceted truths and realities she must face. Daring shifts in narrative perspectives and forms elicit meaning from the muscle and the marrow of words. Only in the act of co-creation between reader and writer may magic happen, magic that could save her, if somehow she can believe. This agile, lyric novella is essential reading for those who believe in the power of the page to transform lived experience. It belongs on the shelf beside genre-defying works by authors who have fused narrative and poetic forms, such as Maggie Nelson, Clarice Lispector, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson. Winner of The 2025 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize Selected by Fatimah Asghar
Ana Maria Caballero is a Colombian American artist and poet whose work examines gendered notions of biology, society, and cultural rites. A leading figure in digital poetics, her work has appeared in artnet, Art Newspaper, Poetry International, BOMB, El Pais, NPR- with performances/exhibitions at V&A, HEK, Francisco Carolinum, Museo Miguel Urrutia, Ashmolean, Venice Biennale, Art Basel, Art Geneve and Fundacion March. She is one of the Forbes "Top 50 Latin Women to Follow." The author of eight books, she is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Prize and Colombia's Jose Manuel Arango Poetry Prize, among others.
"/CUTS is a beautiful meditation on addiction, literature, family and healing. I found myself compelled throughout, struck by the author's lyricism and ability to evoke complex feelings with effective and economical language and syntax. This piece twists what a novel can be, subverts expectations, and is incredibly evocative and visceral. It helps us consider what is possible in the form and what is possible in ourselves." -Fatimah Asghar, author of When We Were Sisters "Ana Maria Caballero makes the hard work of the lyric look so effortless that we can easily forget the superb degree of talent needed by the likes of us to write such language for ourselves." -Christian Boek, author of Eunoia, winner of the Griffin Prize "Crisscrossing Miami, Madrid, Bogota, Antioquia, Hong Kong, and New York, amid so many other stunning itineraries of interiority, searching the world while digging deep into the mess of the self, /CUTS pays hard-earned homage to the genre-bursting possibilities sparked by Julio Cortazar's Rayuelas. But /CUTS risks more than chasing the heights of formal experimentation. It engages the deeper spirit of Cortazar's work in its unabashed questioning of whatever it might mean to be human. It is raw and ever-curious as it delves into questions of femininity, motherhood, alcoholism, and grief; history, inheritance, loss, and belief-this poet and translator is always grappling with what it means to love, what it means to try to heal. This well-wrought translation of Cortazar's form into ecstatic poetic fractals of a feminine transnational subjectivity enacts translation at exponential scales. I'm grateful to dwell with the poet's careful consideration of a constellation of influences (from Clarise Lispector to Maggie Nelson) and all the courageous vulnerability expressed in this book, this relentless work." -Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness "Ana Maria Caballero writes with both wit and warmth, capturing the complexity and nuance of contemporary culture, and the ways we, as women, must navigate its uneven terrain." -Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin, editors of Mother Tongue Magazine
