Poetry is nudity, that’s for sure. The poet peels off his skin, flesh, bones to show us his heart or intestines. There are many cases of solid poetics that go deep to show the soul as it is. Some of these poetics cross the paper, attack us, and we experience such anxiety that we reread them trying to find some light. Open wounds, which sometimes bleed when we least expect it (for some it’s arrogant, but brave for everyone else), help build a poetics that is distinctive, rigid, and hypnotic. A work from the inside out.
Published by Olivia Martínez Giménez de León’s Catalan publisher Candaya and with a foreword by Agustín Pérez Leal, The Hunger Years is the kind of work where you worry from the first line as if something dark is trying to emerge. , like an exorcism. Olivia opens the book with a poem entitled First, which is already a statement of intent: «1. You stop eating sweets at twelve./2. Buttocks of girls on TV./3. It’s not a deduction, it’s a rule./4. In the pilgrimage of the Holy Face, the blood reaches your knees./5. repentant sinner. Guilty./6. You’ll have to cut this piece of meat right here. And here it is. And here./7. Your body is mutating.
The starving years is a collection of poems that clearly construct an identity. Nine Months, divided into five chapters: Love Poetry, Animals, Hunger, and Malquist, shows us the faces of the many-faced Giménez de León, a lyricist-filled writer, as Agustín Pérez Leal puts it in his preface: the lyric poem is the emotional and emotional expression of the person speaking to us. revealing his emotional intimacy without concealing or imitating his naked humanity, this is an important lyric book. Few times have I traveled so clearly the path of words where courage, pain, arrogance and enthusiasm turn into beauty; Few, almost never, a voice born of the clearest verses has managed to stain itself with passion and blood, without losing an iota of its classical breath and clear beauty.
There is so much beauty in this work. Olivia knows how to filter the beauty of her lines, as in her sixth poem from Animals, entitled Butterfly: “There is a dead butterfly on the floor in the bathroom. I get down on my knees in the sand and it flaps its wings in the air. Trying to catch the glow of her wings, I make a cave in my hands. I climb to the top of his name, and when I surrender him to the wind, he rises again». The influences of Anne Carson, Ada Salas, Clara Janés, or Sylvia Plath or the harshness of Carver are obvious. There are inscriptions like knives: “Someone touches you as if you’re running away, lifts you up, grabs you by the hips while he’s inside. Who’s more creepy? He carefully lays you on the mattress and manages not to get out. And now you’ve run out of reasons, you’re just hungry».
Olivia Martínez Giménez de León’s years of starvation are a blow to the gut. It’s like a direct blow to the liver. Olivia knows very well how to use lyrical sources. Every poem has its own image, poetic discourse, light. Because there are beams of light in the possible darkness and harshness of Olivia’s theme, there are poems that show beauty behind the wound, just as in the poem entitled Jazmín: «He who shows himself/the ability to be is not more vulnerable. wounded. //Climbing on my bed every night,/scent of jasmine».
Olivia Martínez Giménez de León was born in Alicante in 1980 and lives by the sea. She is a teacher of spanish language and literature she. El animal y la urbe (2016) and Chloro (2017) published the book she.
Source: Informacion
