books
/Cuts
Caballero’s first novel, /Cuts, received Texas Review Press’ Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and will be published in November 2026.
/Cuts presents itself with a format similar to Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela. Its brief chapters can be read as independent fragments, as a single narrative thread, or as modular combinations of each other.
Set in Madrid and told by a Colombian protagonist, /Cuts narrates the secret struggle of Lucía Nieto against alcoholism. This private battle is not one of privation—Lucía’s solitude allows her to retreat deep within her rich inner world, inhabited by literary figures who sustain her on her solitary path toward health.
In confronting her addiction, Lucía must also confront her past, acknowledging the ways alcoholism has afflicted her family.
Narrative perspective twists to question post-colonial identity and to penetrate Lucía’s private narrative, confounding the voice of the protagonist with that of the author, merging creation with creator.
Its pages also gift such agency to the reader, inviting them to read what they love and to love what they read.
In /Cuts, writing and reading become acts of resistance, challenging societal norms and conventional literary craft. Through an intricate collaboration, writer and reader unite on a mission to save Lucía’s life.
Reviews:
/Cuts is a beautiful meditation on addiction, literature, family and healing. I found myself compelled throughout, struck by the author’s lyricism and ability to evoke complex feelings with effective and economical language and syntax. This piece twists what a novel can be, subverts expectations, and is incredibly evocative and visceral. It helps us consider what is possible in the form and what is possible in ourselves.
—Fatimah Asghar
Ana María Caballero makes the hard work of the lyric look so effortless that we can easily forget the superb degree of talent needed by the likes of us to write such language for ourselves.
—Christian Bök, author of Eunoia, winner of the Griffin Prize
Crisscrossing Miami, Madrid, Bogotá, Antioquia, Hong Kong, and New York, amid so many other stunning itineraries of interiority, searching the world while digging deep into the mess of the self, /CUTS pays hard-earned homage to the genre-bursting possibilities sparked by Julio Cortázar’s Rayuelas. But /CUTS risks more than chasing the heights of formal experimentation. It engages the deeper spirit of Cortázar’s work in its unabashed questioning of whatever it might mean to be human. It is raw and ever-curious as it delves into questions of femininity, motherhood, alcoholism, and grief; history, inheritance, loss, and belief—this poet and translator is always grappling with what it means to love, what it means to try to heal.
This well-wrought translation of Cortázar’s form into ecstatic poetic fractals of a feminine transnational subjectivity enacts translation at exponential scales. I’m grateful to dwell with the poet’s careful consideration of a constellation of influences (from Clarise Lispector to Maggie Nelson) and all the courageous vulnerability expressed in this book, this relentless work.
—Aaron Coleman, author of Red Wilderness
Ana María Caballero writes with both wit and warmth, capturing the complexity and nuance of contemporary culture, and the ways we, as women, must navigate its uneven terrain.
—Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin, editors of Mother Tongue Magazine
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