Internationally acclaimed as a poet and visual artist, Cecilia Vicuna is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. Since the mid-60s, she has worked with abandoned materials and rubbish to create works of art she calls "precarios"--fragile constructions of string, bark, pebbles: small boats left floating in city puddles, handwoven nets strung across rivers. In her poetry, Vicuna combines Andean vernacular with other languages to form highly condensed metaphors, puns, and anagrams, thus inventing language looms on which meaning is woven. Indeed, in the ancient language of the Inkas, "weaving" and "language" are the same word. The book's unique design incorporates an elaborately illustrated artist's book by Vicuna and a collection of critical essays that consider her work in its Latin American and global context.

Cecilia Vicuna is the author of Unraveling Words and the Weaving of Water (1992). Her art has been exhibited in galleries around the world, most recently at the Whitney Biennial in New York. M. Catherine De Zegher, director of the Kanaal Art Foundation in Belgium, recently curated and edited the international exhibition "Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, in, of, and from the Feminine."