After Everything: Selected Poems by Jorge Tellier

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Translated by Sonnet Phelps and Sebastián Gómez Matus

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 (1935–1996) was a central figure of Chile’s Generación del 50. In 1956, at just 21, he published his first book Para ángeles y gorriones, and went on to release a series of landmark collections—including Poemas del País de Nunca Jamás (1963) and Muertes y maravillas (1971)—that established him as one of Latin America’s most original lyric voices. Teillier remained in Chile throughout the Pinochet dictatorship, entering what he called “a time of roots,” living in semi-seclusion far from the capital. 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.” 

Sonnet R. Phelps is a writer and translator from Northern California. She is the recipient of the Joan Lee Yang Memorial Poetry Prize and the Schola Cantorum Poetry Award, and has held artistic residencies in Valparaíso and San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Konch Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and Mercury Firs. She recently spent a year living in Santiago and Valparaíso, Chile, as a Fulbright research fellow, and now lives between California’s Bay Area and Providence, Rhode Island, where she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Sebastián Gómez Matus is a poet and translator whose books of poetry include Animal muerto (Aparte, 2020), which received mention in the Juegos Florales Gabriela Mistral 2019; Po, la constitución borrada (2021); Cómo imaginé Bagdad y cómo la encontré (Dharma Books Publishing, 2023) for which he received the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y los Artes (CNCA) grant for Poetry in Chile. As a translator, he has published full-length collections by Chika Sagawa, Zachary Schomburg, Mary Ruefle, Alice Notley, Etel Adnan, Wong May and Terrance Hayes, among others. He received the Looren Translation House grant in 2023, is part of the KA Collective of scenic arts, and currently lives in Santiago de Chile, working as a teacher and literature & poetry critic.

Cover photo by Eduardo Ortiz