Congratulations to Jeanne-Marie Osterman whose most recent poetry collection, Who Killed Marta Ugarte?, was published today in Chile in a bilingual edition by NoteBook Poiesis & Cross-Cultural Communications, featuring a Spanish translation by celebrated Colombian poet, Ximena Gómez. Professor Luis Cruz-Villalobos of Universidad de Talca in Chile, writes in a new introduction:
[Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s] writing emerges from an ethical awareness that does not shy away from difficult questions: How do we remember what so many have tried to forget? How can we name horror without trivializing it? How can we take responsibility for a collective wound from a position of geographic, linguistic, and biographical distance?
[Jeanne-Marie Osterman’s] escritura surge desde una conciencia ética que no elude las preguntas difíciles: ¿Cómo recordar lo que tantos han intentado olvidar? ¿Cómo nombrar el horror sin banalizarlo? ¿Cómo hacerse cargo de una herida colectiva desde la distancia geográfica, lingüística y biográfica?
Here’s a brief review by Aileen Cassinetto that appeared in The Poetry Lighthouse:
In this unforgettable elegy, Jeanne-Marie Osterman takes us to Chile during the Pinochet era, beginning with a compendium of atrocities spanning 17 years. The narrator makes her way across the Chilean Coast, the Atacama Desert, and to Villa Grimaldi, scrutinizing and logging artifacts of torture: tracks, nails, metal coils, the black ink of redaction. With care and precision, she remembers, “dusts off bits of bone… [reimagines faces] through the shape of a skull.”
Having grown up under a brutal dictatorship, these poems remind me of the power of witness and history. Given time, given distance, and memory’s purchase, how do we discern what was revised, and why. In “What I Remember About El Museo de la Memoria,” the narrator provides a context for her excavation of the disappeared, and “their poetry of how to survive.”
I remember thinking that in a country accused of forgetting,
it was all here to remember…
In “Who Am I,” the narrator critiques her own role in the retelling, her place in this witnessing:
to be a voice for the disappeared,
fifty years later,
put into words wounds
of a country not my own,
language not my own,
More than remembrance, the narrator acknowledges “wounds/ from guns of country, my own…” and “junta by telex/ from Henry Kissinger…” referring to how the U.S. supported authoritarian regimes that were more aligned with U.S. policy:
Poetry of witness—I witness
only to television reports
sent by satellite morning of September 11, 1973
Osterman masterfully builds tension with imagery and lyricism, even as the reader in outrage moves against it, an involuntary impulse in the face of horror. However, we cannot, must not look away. To dismantle tyranny is to witness for each other. Say the names of Marta Ugarte, of Giana Rosetta Pallini González, and the names “engraved in the sidewalk outside #38.” We need to remember “to return to the heart” because history cannot, must not be allowed to repeat itself.
About the Poet:
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of four books of poetry: ¿Quién Asesinó a Marta Ugarte? / Who Killed Marta Ugarte? (NoteBook Poiesis & Cross-Cultural Communications, 2025), Shellback (Paloma Press, 2021), There’s a Hum (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and All Animals Want the Same Things, winner of the Slipstream Press 34th Annual Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in Borderlands, New Ohio Review, Cathexis Northwest, 45th Parallel Magazine, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2025 American Legacy Book Awards for Contemporary Poetry and finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and 2017 Levis Prize in Poetry, she is poetry editor for Cagibi, a journal of prose and poetry.
