The last Ojo Crítico de Poesía award, by the Sevillian Laura Rodríguez Díaz (1998), was published in Barcelona at the end of last year. Corazonada, the new collection of poems by Berta García Faet (València, 1988), one of the best poets in Spanish, has been published in the same city, since since Anagrama acquired La Nueva Varsovia in 2021, its headquarters are on Pau Claris Street . Its editor, the writer Elena Medel, resides in Madrid. But the Catalan domicile of both projects is causing a good part of the best verses published on paper by authors under 40 years old from all over the State to reach Barcelona copyright bookstores.
García Faet defines his relationship with the city of Barcelona as "very intense", since he lived here "in two very important periods of my life, and here I grew a lot intellectually and literary, I owe a lot to the master's degree in Political Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra." Her “loving and fragmentary” relationship with literature in Catalan is also important, “without a doubt, Mercè Rodoreda and Blanca Llum Vidal are fundamental writers for me.” He was impressed during his visit last January to participate in the literary cafes at Casa Seat, the Anagrama location and he loved “chatting, and receiving very accurate recommendations, with booksellers from Finestres, Documenta, La Central, Calders and Espai Crisi.”
Alberto Haller, editorial director of Barlin Libros, who has published García Faet's essay The art of igniting words, came to the presentation from Valencia. The moving dimension of poetry, where the author not only outlines a personal poetics and analyzes various literary themes with absolute formal freedom, such as the “idea-hunch”, she also intervenes in the classic debate between supporters of the poetry of experience or communication and the defenders of poetry as knowledge, with the will to overcome it. In a context of poetry readings from all periods, from all over the world and of all ages.
The Beautiful Warsaw has been characterized, since its origins exactly twenty years ago, by its faith in emergency. Some of the authors in its catalog are now references (María Sánchez, Andrés Neuman), but there is always room for new authors. Some of them are Juli Mesa, Leire Bilbao or Sara Torres, who in 2016 published Conjuros y cantos in Kriler71, another Barcelona publisher that also believes in risk and ambition.
Ultramarinos was born in 2016 and is directed by Barcelona-born Unai Velasco, who had won the Miguel Hernández National Young Poetry Prize three years earlier with his book En este lugar (This is not Berlin, 2012). In the prologue of the latest title he has published, Taking a Photo in the Bathroom Mirror, by Julio Fuertes (1989), he remembers his trips to Madrid at the beginning of the last decade together with university classmates, such as Marc García and Mario Amadas. . That connection through the AVE and the successive low-cost lines has been fundamental for the new Spanish poetry. As has also been the mastery of some figures from previous generations, such as Sergio Gaspar, first editor of Medel and advisor to Ultramarinos.
“I am convinced that Barcelona has the greatest potential in the State to lead an alternative cultural model, which can de facto propose a multilingual cultural model,” says Velasco, “for example, bookstores like Nollegiu and Finestres systematically offer literature in the Galician language in their shelves.” Both Ultramarinos and La Bella Varsovia publish books written in other languages of the peninsula: the latter has published Bestia, by Irene Solà, in translation by Velasco; and that one, Aquest amor que no es u · Este amor que no es uno, by Vidal, in translation by García Faet, in addition to Pol Guasch or the collected poetry of the Galician poet Chus Pato. Another Barcelona label, Animal Suspected, which runs the bookstore of the same name in Gràcia – with intense poetic activity – has published Bajo Suspicion, an anthology of poets born between 1976 and 1993 who write in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician.
This transversality is embodied by the poet and bookseller Claudia González Caparrós in her own biography. The author of If the flesh is grass (Sully Morland) and I look at you like someone attending a thaw (both in La Bella Varsovia), was born in A Coruña in 1993, studied a degree in Literary Studies in Barcelona and a master's degree in Madrid and another in the United States. She later co-founded the Espai Crisi in our city, which is defined as a space for “critical thinking where we can learn and think together.” That is what today's young poets seem to be doing, in their verses and in their editorials.
