A concentrated and intense serial poem, Anthem of Evaporated Tears (El deber del pan) exemplifies the poetics of the elemental that characterizes Xavier Valcárcel's work, this time focusing on the generative qualities of fire's most destructive potentialities. Inspired by Virgil's Aeneid, the collection turns to face the violence at the heart of domesticity and gender, which is reconfigured by the poetic voice and his mother. Their mutual disillusionment with men frees neither of their responsibilities, as they attempt to flee a home in flames by going on vacation to another Caribbean island. Far from their daily labors, they are forced to turn back and look at the ashes of the home they left in their wake, in order to make sense of the totalizing potential they have nurtured together. Bread, oversignified by literature and history, is a product of both care and gendered labor and, like the violence that forges it, becomes invisible through repetition. Valcárcel breaks down the base materials for its creation, adding his own grief, his mother’s, and the final ingredient: fire. This bilingual edition, translated by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, breathes new life into a contemporary Puerto Rican classic.

"Xavier Valcárcel’s El deber del pan struck me with full force upon publication—“changed” feels far too slight. Like many, I came to read it as a testament to a life lived and a life still living and set ablaze by our own conflagrations. In the conspiracy of translation, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera kneads Valcárcel’s violence and tenderness, its intimacy and flight, extending the book’s position as an indelible landmark in our literature. It sings with generous compassion, in English as it does in Spanish—not only with fealty, but with profound care. Here is the work of our hands, which nourishes us and must continue to feed. This book is sustenance and provocation, opening our eyes to the tender, brutal realities we carry within us, and through which we are made."
—Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, author of The Life Assignment