She was 9 years old when Daniela Catrileo discovered poetry. It was thanks to a literature workshop at her school. Like someone having an epiphany in the desert, the future writer found a place she would never leave. “The language teacher created that space for elementary students, I was there for about three years. We published our first poems on the mural newspaper, dared to read aloud in front of our classmates, invented pseudonyms, and formed a small community of boy and girl poets who got up early every Saturday to go write their first verses,” she tells Culto.
In fact, it is no coincidence that her first books were precisely poetry. Río herido, from 2016, was the swan song. She was even a Fellow of the Pablo Neruda Foundation in 2011, and received the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize 2019 for her poetry collection Guerra florida. Today, those 10 years of poetic journey come together in the volume Soñamos con cetáceos (Seix Barral), which includes some unpublished poems that correspond to a work in progress and are presented as a preview in this edition.
“Poetry goes against speed, it takes us to unexpected places, it fills us with questions. It is still a risky place because of its uselessness in the show business world we live in, no one expects you to write a new poem. Its anti-capitalist drive is what I find deeply brave. It is indigestible, inedible, as Pasolini said. For me, it is just an encounter, it is not possessed. It is a moment, but it reverberates in strange and beautiful ways.”
Soñamos con cetáceos gathers a decade of your poetic work. What was it like to reread those books from the present? What did you discover about your own writing?
I have returned several times to reading those books, partly because they have been gathered in different anthologies published in Argentina (Todas quisimos ser el sol, Las Guachas, 2023) and in Chile (Un puñado de almendras, University of Chile, 2025). What interests me about that return is recognizing certain insistencies and gestures that unfold in the images, rhythms, and modulations of each book. I am also interested in the possibility that every text can transform through a new look, another light projected onto the poems. Returning to them does not imply fixing a meaning, but discovering what the writing itself had not yet revealed.
When you look at this journey between 2016 and 2026, what elements remain and which do you feel have radically changed in your voice?
What remains is a search, sometimes more transparent, other times more opaque, to skirt language. A search sustained by the insistencies of desire and curiosity. I try to approach the unknown through words, even knowing they will always be insufficient. Each book responds to a different need. Río herido is a plural testimony about dispossession and diaspora. Mi costado salvaje gathers sketches of the everyday, as if the poems had been torn from a life diary. I think that voice changes because I try to attend to the intuition of each moment: listen to it, follow its drift, and let the writing itself find its form.
What is poetry to you?
It was my first language, also my first failure with language. It is the way I learned to translate the world, my amazement at the inexplicable, a way not to exhaust questions or forms. A way to breathe, imagine, think. It is thinking tangentially, from the edges, throwing oneself into the world we are. It is a refuge.
There are very present themes in your poetry, such as the theme of waters: the sea, rivers, and territories. What draws your attention to include them?
Waters constitute my poetics, and writing is the way I approach my obsessions. The waters write me: they are part of my Mapuche lineage, of the way I orient myself spiritually and epistemologically. With the poems, I try to capture an image that is not only contemplative but also condenses rhythm, cadence, and sonority. That is, a form of listening, a form of relationship. There, rivers, waves, and currents shape my encounter with matter, with all that exists.
Territoriality is also very present in your poetry. Has the Mapuche perspective influenced that?
Of course, for me being Mapuche is mainly related to a common memory, a way of understanding a territory, a way of relating to my ancestors, to the elements that coexist in the place where we are situated.
You have been read as one of the voices of contemporary urban Mapuche poetry. How do you inhabit the condition of warriache (Mapuche from the city) in your writing?
It depends on the book. I do not work from a personal position that directly thematizes that experience. Perhaps where the warriache experience appears most is in Piñen, my book of stories. In poetry, some sketches can be found in Río herido or Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas. But in those three books, I displace the subjective figure to work from fiction. More than an individual condition, I am interested in thinking of it as a collective experience of dispossession and forced migration, with all the contradictions that inhabiting borders implies.
This volume includes a group of unpublished poems, Soñamos con cetáceos, when reading them there is much reflection on the relationship between environmental pollution and its consequences on people’s health. Do you conceive poetry as a place for reflection on current issues?
Poetry, as a form of thought and affectation, also dialogues with its present. It does not do so from the whirlwind of spectacle nor from the urgency of the news, but it also does not remain isolated from the world. Through the poem, we build a relationship with who we are and with what surrounds us; it is a way to question reality and to question ourselves. I think of a beautiful phrase by the poet Juan L. Ortiz when he speaks of a sensitive awareness before horror and suffering. He says that poetry is suffering, but a suffering of love. I understand that statement as a way to remain attentive, sleepless before the wound, without giving up the possibility of listening, caring, and imagining other forms of relationship with the world.
Another notable element is that in your poetry you almost never use an “I,” rather the “we.” A plural lyrical speaker. Why are you interested in doing it this way?
It is a formal decision; there are multiple voices I am interested in working with, not only my intimacy or the confessional voice. I also work fiction in the poem, as if there were a fragmented narrative where what matters is absence, the unsaid. The “we” seems to me a collective power when it appears.
You studied philosophy, and in your poetry it is also possible to see precisely a reflective vein. How do you handle the intersection between both disciplines?
For me, both crafts bring us to the same shore: that of questions. As if poetry and philosophy allowed us to accept that there are no definitive certainties and that, faced with this, we can only surrender to amazement, drift, risk, and boldness. Both poetry and philosophy are uncomfortable for the contemporary world because they resist the logic of immediacy and closed answers. They remind us that we are sensitive beings and that, faced with the unknown, we can inhabit lack as a form of openness. Ignorance, in that sense, keeps questions alive, and both poetry and philosophy make possible the encounter with what we still do not understand.
Your work moves between poetry and narrative. What freedoms does poetry offer you that you do not find in other genres? What differences do you see between writing one genre and another?
For me, genres respond, above all, to a market logic. I write narrative and essay as if they were poems. In fact, everything I write begins in the poem: there I find a way of thinking and the rhythm that will sustain the writing, even when it ends up becoming a story or an essay. If the difference between genres is, to a large extent, an editorial classification, poetry offers me the freedom to go against the flow of time. It allows me to inhabit slowness, listen patiently, linger on an image, follow a drift without the obligation to immediately reach a destination. In that space, I find an intensity that hardly appears in other writing registers.
In an era marked by speed and digital overexposure, what place does poetry occupy for you today as a space for reflection and listening?
Poetry is part of my life. As a reader, as a teacher, as a poet. From there I think, imagine, teach. I get up reading poetry, read poems to my friends, try to infect others with that desire.
How do you see Chilean poetry today?
Poetry in Chile continues to be deeply fertile. Poetry is written despite everything. Young people continue attending workshops, organizing readings, creating collective fanzines, and sustaining spaces where the poem remains a form of encounter. I think Chilean poetry enjoys persistent vitality. There is a very powerful tradition and genealogies, but also a permanent will to experiment. That coexistence between heritage and invention has forged a very particular relationship with language. The drive for the poem that exists in this country never ceases to amaze me, that persistent need to write, read, and share poetry, even in the most adverse moments.
Chile’s two Nobel Prizes are precisely poets. Do you think poetry in Chile is given the importance it deserves?
We give it that importance, those of us who find in it a way of life, who enjoy reading and writing it, but the same does not happen from institutions. Poetry continues to occupy the smallest spaces in libraries and bookstores. Recognitions and awards are important, but they are insufficient in the face of the need to sustain reading and creation communities. More spaces are needed for workshops, book clubs, training programs, and creation grants that allow poetry to keep circulating. And what to say about the present, marked by worrying news about cuts in culture.
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