Criticism of Cristina Peri Rossi's poetry is scant in comparison to that devoted to her novels and short stories; critics have mainly been interested in her portrayal of homoeroticism and in the psychology of exile. According to Carmen Domínguez in Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes (1998), the portrayal of sexual encounters, most frequently between women, transforms the female subject into a "paradigm of the beloved subject, the only being capable of arousing passion." In an attempt to blur the conventional delineation of gender and sexual identities, Peri Rossi frequently uses male rather than female speakers and narrators in her poetry and fiction. Her poetry has changed from the intricate images of the early 1970s that reveal the influence of Modernista aesthetics to the more questioning writings of the 1980s and 1990s, in which she views exile and marginality as constant conditions.

Peri Rossi was...