Adrián Bernal undertakes a bold reimagining of ultra-capitalism, tracing a counter-truth that touches the spine of The Divine Comedy while weaving through intertexts that hover over debates labeled as contemporary radicalism. Anti-folk, published by La garúa in Barcelona in 2021, comprises ten songs and successive interludes that shift from poetic prose to pound verse. Through its form, it lays bare the tensions embedded in modern life by giving voice to a poetic subject who moves through the city like a modern oracle. The reader wanders with a figure who wanders through hell and a present that keeps revealing new circles of Dantesque texture, a scene populated by guts and iron, ATMs, elevators, and subway entrances. At the end of Canto Eight, the author cautions, this poem does not merely talk about the city; the city will fall, and this poem talks about war. (citation: Descontrol, 2019)
Beginning his journey from Alicante to Barcelona, the poet has built a substantial body of work since the early days of April and March for twenty-nine days (DisparaLaPalabra, 2012). Works titled All the Cities of Fire (Difficult, Valladolid, 2015) and Winter (Books in their ink, Barcelona, 2016) established a clear trajectory. Of particular note is Todas las ciudades del fuego, which earned the Martín García Ramos International Poetry Prize in its thirteenth edition. That collection anticipates many Anti-People themes, including genre ambiguity and a culture tinted by pop-inflected sensibilities. His lines have found echoes in diverse anthologies such as Brossa de foc. Critical poetry in Barcelona design, Descontrol, 2019, and in literary journals like Poscultura, Orsini Mag, Palabra Voyeur, La Galla Ciencia, El Salto, Nayagua, and El colloquio de los perros. (citation: Descontrol, 2019)
The book at the center of this discussion marks a daring turn toward a lean, agile diction. Anti-folk assembles a cohesive unit built from a wave of psalms and liturgies, delivered in a conversational register that, while accessible, remains richly paradoxical and expansive. The poet’s voice, traditionally a bridge between the private and the public, dissolves into the crowd and then bursts into the core of ideological production that frames historical individuality. A single syllable often crystallizes the book’s leitmotif with striking clarity: the line nothing more than this is a concise, piercing reflection on violence. (citation: Catalan/Spanish literary press)
Confronted with the city’s logic and its calm, the reader encounters ecstasy and exile in equal measure. The texture becomes literalism rather than metaphor, a visual intensification of storefronts and the relentless tempo of urban life, where consumption drives the scene. The verses speak to the impulse to escape yet expose how escape itself binds people to the city and its pain. The speaker notes that both the city and pain are inheritance, and that the lines reveal the grooves of hands‑turned fortunes with a quiet, listening intensity, like a sibyl at the edge of a rye field. The prophecy on the ear of the rye resonates, while shadow figures of the lost become visible along the miles of snow and fog‑shrouded beaches. The poet observes how the tongues of the jinn—those elusive, dream‑music languages—have always spoken their own dialect, and that confession of language is a sign of our shared humanity. The danger lies in accepting that the self can speak freely within the daily machinery of life, a condition the text terms Hell in Hell, a place where ideological unconsciousness creates us anew in ordinary, everyday acts. (citation: Contemporary poetry reviews)