“Part prayer. Part testimony. All heart. Beasts Behave in Foreign Land refuses to lie down and be quiet, refuses to compromise beauty or the beast: the beast we carry within, the one forged in us through multiple denials. This book, with its confident and competent voice and diverse ways of seeing, leads us into and out of the labyrinth of the self and the labyrinths of history―presents herstory with its torture and song. This book sings. This book tells the truth, the truth of ‘our vacuous beginning on the highway / and the big inevitable bang.’” ―Lorna Dee Cervantes
“Memory after memory, gesture after gesture, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land is an exquisite chronicle of insistent survival, a matrilineal journey of decades and thousands of miles between Argentina and New Jersey. Ruth Irupé Sanabria masterfully juxtaposes the plain language of government-sanctioned violence, the inheritance of its physical and psychological toll upon politicized bodies, against the language of nature and innocence…―Rich Villar, essayist/poet/activist, author of Comprehending Forever
“‘Heart, I’ve confused you with a tambourine again,’ writes Ruth Irupé Sanabria in the title poem of this wrenching, startling collection. The poet writes from the collective experience of crimes against humanity in Argentina, where a military dictatorship disappeared countless thousands, her mother included. This is a landscape of nightmares, of ‘headless uncles,’ yet, time and again Sanabria summons the courage to testify, to speak on behalf of the ghosts, living and dead, to name the assassins…” ―Martín Espada