Cuerpo Amado/Beloved Body

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Cuerpo Amado/Beloved Body is the story of a woman and a man who become
passionate and tender lovers. The woman discovers that she has breast
cancer and undergoes a mastectomy. She endures fear, pain, the sudden
differences in her life, as does he. She struggles to come to terms with
her altered body and physicality, to find the wholeness of herself once
again. She succeeds, and complete once more (in the fullest sense of the
word), she and her lover embrace life again.

Rio’s poetry absorbs us. We experience the surprising joy of a mature
love, the affection and the desire, the “edgeless reality” of time
in their life together. But the story Rio tells is not autobiographical.
Rather, it is the result of the shared experiences of many different
women. Their bodies become the body that is loved and loving, then
wounded and “a body lacking / symmetry,” and finally, resiliently, a
body loved and beloved once more. Time, aging, anxiety and fear, the
loss of oneself, the need to love and be loved are among the themes
richly explored in this work.

Rio’s concern about language and the impossibility of language adds
yet another dimension: how do we communicate love, fear, hope, anxiety,
and joy when our words are subsumed by what we are feeling? In Spanish,
and in the beautiful and sensitive English translation by Hugh Hazelton,
Rio writes what we cannot say. The body speaks and we listen. The voice
we hear is everywoman’s, and it is strong.