In her lyric essay, translator Judith Filc brings the reader to various spaces, such as Hart Island and Skid Row, calling into these spaces various names like Jacques Derrida and Anne Carson—awhile weaving her own observations into an essay examining the comforts of language. How do we find ourselves, or our identity, within lingual confines both iron-clad and flexible?

Judith Filc was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1962. She's a poet, translator, and essayist. Filc received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. She has published eight volumes of poetry in Spanish, as well as her translations into English of poems and poetry books by Argentine and Peruvian authors. Her essays are coming out in the e-journal Viceversa. From 2012 to 2018, Filc administered the blog Word Creation / Crear con palabras, where she published her translations of Latin American poetry.