Maria Baranda - Böcker

A lyrical collection of the finest poems by a leading Mexican poet, superbly translated for English readers  “A literary event. . . . [Baranda’s] work provides a bestiary as fierce as those found in the Odyssey, Beowulf, or The Waste Land.”—Merrill Kaitz, Arts Fuse  “A valuable collection . . . a metaphysical and philosophical luminosity of language that immerses the reader in cycles of life, death, and a quest for understanding what it means to be able to perceive.”—Susan Smith Nash, World Literature Today  The poetry of María Baranda is a haunting homage to the natural world, transcendent in scope, attentive to the particular, and acutely attuned to the mystery of being. Absorbed by nature’s otherness, Baranda seeks to inhabit the voices of the wind, of wings, night, day, and perhaps most keenly, water. These lyrical verses turn repeatedly to the longings and griefs of embodiment: “What is that God / To be praised with all our sadness / If not love / Or at least the wonder / Of being a body full of blood,” Baranda asks.  Drawing on epics such as the Aeneid and Beowulf, the mystical verses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and writers who engage the landscape of shore and sea, from Daniel Defoe to Dylan Thomas, this sweeping collection brings together the finest poems of one of today’s most powerful and innovative Mexican writers.

Ficticia was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of 'Letters to Robinson', and a 'Sky Cycle'. While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.

Maria Baranda is one of the leading Mexican poets of the generation, born in the 1960s. Her work has received Mexico's distinguished Efrain Huerta and Aguascalientes national poetry prizes, as well as Spain's Francisco de Quevedo Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. She is increasingly known for her sweeping and incisive long poems and book-length projects, and this volume contains two such works: 'To Tell' and the title poem.