In her personal / poetic essay Arqueología de un cisne, Colombian writer Juliana Rozo traces two paths where beauty, trauma and violence intersect in works of art, family lore and historical events in Colombia. One of these paths goes historically through mythological, literary and artistic places in which the swan has had a relevance: starting with the artist Hilma Af Klint, the writer Marcel Proust, and the “Swan Lake,” to Latin American musical references such as Luis Alberto Spinetta and a Colombian film, Cóndores no entierran todos los días by Francisco Norden. The other path immerses the reader in the intimate and poetic relationship that the writer finds in the figure of the swan and the porous boundary between beauty and violence.

Smol Books contributed the Spanish text and illustrations for the bilingual edition of Arqueología de un cisne. Smol Books is an independent publishing house that specializes in short stories by authors who break literary, thematic, formal, and linguistic boundaries in experimental fiction.