Stolen Flower [Paperback]

From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance

Longlisted for the 2026 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
 
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity.
 
Stolen Floweris Irma Pinedas powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxaz? (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexicos Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.

Stolen Flowerspeaks directly to its own place and moment, . . . insisting that we cant ignore the hand of evil, that we have an obligation to speak to and about it.Lily Meyer, Poetry Foundation

These are powerful, compact poems that resonate particularly strongly in the United States in early 2026but sadly also in far too many other places.M. A.Orthofer,Complete Review

Irma PinedasStolen Flowerwields heart-wrenching, beautiful poetryflowered wordsagainst the grain of state-sponsored terror. . . . A transformative read.Adam W. Coon,Latin American Literature Today

In the tradition of Latin American testimonial poetry, [Pineda] exposes injustice in glaring detail. . . . By condemning these horrors, slã,