The most anticipated poetic collection by a veteran Spanish poet has just arrived in bookstores. From Fuente del Arco in Badajoz to the literary circuits of Valencia, the author has long carried a steady flame, building a mature, serious poetic voice that refuses to chase trends. Entitled Too Much, the book is released with careful care by a small but resolute imprint known for its commitment to sharp, exacting work. Across recent works such as Right, For Nothing in the World, and Towards Violence, as well as essays like Low-Intensity Fascism and Threshold Theory, the poet has consistently explored the psychic terrain of modern life and its political undercurrents.
Valencia has been the poet’s home since youth, a place where teaching and public cultural engagement have shaped a broad, if sometimes controversial, contribution to regional literary life. Early on, the author drew attention for a prolific output that spoke to the transition from apocalyptic prophecy at the century’s end to the uncertainties of the new century. The work has been recognized by prestigious circles and prizes, including the Hyperión Prize in its mid-1990s edition, which helped spark wider interest. In scholarly circles, discussions of place, memory, and identity recur as central themes, as seen in academic inquiries such as the volumes and conversations surrounding ¿Un lugar sin lugar? from the period.
Too Much presents a structure built from five principal segments and almost a hundred poems, a design that invites a non-linear reading. The arrangement emphasizes a rhythm built from fragmented syntax and deliberate, non-random punctuation. Beyond a raw verbal shock, the piece carries an avant-garde impulse—visible in symmetric strophic forms that carry a medieval echo and in concise, sometimes irrationalist aphorisms. The texture of the verse remains deliberate and concentrated, with a nuanced balance between readable clarity and a more cryptic, arid intensity that lingers in the mind long after reading. The texture of the language, with its rhythm and cadence, is a core feature that guides the reader through a landscape of memory and invention.
Together, the collection presents a Nietzschean indictment of subjectivity, asking readers to confront how language can betray or distort experience. At times, language seems to resist or outpace its own referents, creating a gap where the speaker and the audience negotiate meaning in a conversation that never fully settles. A celebrated example line speaks to the paradox of knowledge and presence: the pain of recognition, the search for sound, and the ache of those who have departed, all culminating in a return to a world that is at once familiar and elusive. The poet’s voice becomes a vehicle for examining how perception shapes reality, and how the act of naming can both reveal and obscure truth.
The opening chapter centers on a compact, urgent inquiry into reality, where brevity collapses into a fragmentary grasp of being. The text asks what value there is in anything until it is touched by someone else, a question that probes love, life, and writing as ongoing negotiations with absence and presence. It posits that language persists only insofar as memory and reference allow it, and it challenges readers to consider what remains when signs lose their ordinary anchors. In this light, the opening pages present a meditation on language as a living, stubborn force that resists easy interpretation, inviting readers to participate in a discourse that is as much about self-recognition as it is about literature.
The second section, a pulse of poetic prose, pushes the breath of the poem to its outer limits. Automatic and breath-driven, it spills over into a vision tethered to time, fate, and memory. It confronts the landscapes of place and the weight of time as experienced through a personal lens, where the topology of memory and the structure of destiny intertwine. While Bosquimania and Alphabet or Deck revisit earlier forms—brief, precise lines that still carry a vivid charge—the prose cadence adds a sense of motion that broadens the reader’s immersion. The poems Cochlear Implant and Que Anochezca stand out as unusually lucid pieces in a world made of deautomatized signs and shifting meanings, illustrating how contemporary poetry can reframe everyday perception. The Divan de A brings the sequence to a close with expansive, confident lyricism, weaving earlier motifs into a mature, resolute style that honors both form and feeling without surrendering to simple psalm-like rhetoric or a fragmented narrative that merely throws ideas at the reader.