Your Cross in the Desert Sky

An erotic confession, an essay about confused love, and a story of passion without presence.

A Twitter thread leads a writer to ＂meet＂ a Chilean poet in China. The lovers can’t touch each other, they live a full day of time zones apart, and their only possibility of seeing each other is through a screen. And yet their connection is electric--at least for our narrator. She can’t stop thinking about this man, and that obsession makes the whole world its metaphor. Your Cross in the Desert Sky is a love affair that is consummated repeatedly, but never in person, and a collision that only one party may feel. In this territory of did they or didn’t they, Sanín roams her own history; the meaning of desire; and how we perform intimacy, seduction, and entirely new selves on social media, in bullfights, and on the page. The sex is charged, but so is the demand to look at everything--from Macbeth to the Panama Canal to Jesus’s shroud--as a way to understand who we are, and how we relate to each other and our mortality.

Carolina Sanín was born in Bogotá. She is the author of several novels, a book of short stories, and two children’s books. She has also published books of essays and anthologies. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Yale. She has taught literature at SUNY Purchase College, the Universidad de Los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has written for El Espectador, semana.com, Semana Sostenible, Credencial, Vice, Cambio and Arcadia.

Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish.