City of Kings Book

City of Kings is one of the hardest books - novels, short stories, what have you - I've read this year. Its hard in the sense of being hard to bear. The injustice of being colonised, on the level of the individual, to the familial, communal, societal, cultural, and all the other ways one's mode of being changes when another's is forced upon you, attempting to grind you into the dust while the taking of every conceivable thing - from land to labour - commences and continues, in one shape or another, seemingly ad nauseum. This, is what stays with me. Rosario Castellanos shows us the perspectives of coloniser and colonised, using stark reality and elements of folklore along the way, juxtaposed in sometimes charming, yet always disturbing ways. Her clarity in language is one of the qualities I most admire in this collection, and has me curious about further works and the author herself. To that end, The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos is what I've decided to look to next.