Description:
What if you are nobody? You look inside yourself and there is only a vast wasteland where nothing can be heard. Where will you go carrying your own emptiness?
Brief description: María Ángeles Pérez López (born in Valladolid, Spain, 1967) is a poet and Professor of Contemporary Spanish Poetry and Hispano-American Literature at the University of Salamanca. She has published various award-winning books, including Fiebre y compassion de los metals/Fever and Compassion of Metals (Vaso Roto, 2016); her book Incendio mineral ( Vaso Roto, 2021) was awarded the Premio Nacional de la Crítica in 2022. Collections of her work have been published in Caracas, Mexico City, Quito, New York, Monterrey, Bogota and Lima. Also, bilingually, in Italy and Portugal. Her book Carnalidad del frío/Carnality of Cold ( Premio Ciudad de Badajoz, Algaida, 2000) has been published bilingually in Brazil and the United States. Libro mediterráneo de los muertos/Mediterranean Book of the Dead (Pre-Textos, 2023) won the VI Premio Margarita Hierro de Poesía. She is a member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, adoptive daughter of Fontiveros, and a member of the Academy of Troubadours of Fontivero, birthplace of Saint John of the Cross. She is a member of the Association "Genealogists," which seeks to recognize the legacy of women poets. She has been a judge for several literary prizes, among them the Premio Cervantes, one of Spain's most prestigious literary awards.
Review Quotes:
María Ángeles Pérez López is animal and mineral. She falls from the sky and rises from the earth. She glows in the night and basks in the sun. She is "an instant of presence, meteor that rushes to end up colliding with the invisible line of the atmosphere, naked lizard surrounded by cement." At one point in her dazzling Mineral Fire, she declares that "I haven't forgotten that I was kissing you so I could disappear in your belly." You will not forget her kiss, and she will stay on in your belly.
H. L. HixMineral Fire is a stunning perceptual experiment, an attempt to apprehend simultaneously the tempos of the human body and cycles of geologic time, an exploration of how these scales belong to one another. This collection is filled with collaborations with the living and the dead, with the Earth itself. They are prose poems with incredible dynamic range, gravity and light, fever and science, conducting a migration of language that bears witness to the imagination as it moves. Of course, a work that contemplates the continents of the Earth and the specificities of the body- as-continent should travel latitudes. What an exciting literary contribution to have the first ever translation of María Ángeles Pérez López's poems into English.
Patrick Rosal