Juana I

Poetry. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid Genre. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, JUANA I is Ana Arzoumanian's first full length publication in English. A hybrid genre prose work of experimental, critical historiography, Lila Zembourain describes the book thus: "This book opens with a mantra, 'What I need is a mouth.' Yet the text emits many voices, imagining the circumstances that surrounded the figure of Juana the Mad, the legitimate Queen of Spain in the first half of the XVI century, who was declared insane then silenced and confined to a convent. Ana Arzoumanian subsumes us in a dense and powerful atmosphere in which the liberated mouth unveils with an abject heroism that could be called feminine, the tensions that historical circumstances impose over bodies."