Writing about desire in a world where censorship is returning

Read A match to the tongueThis collection of erotic poetry, edited by Nina Busquet and Anna Noguer, is a territory where desire is articulated not as metaphor, but as raw material. Every word is a risk in a world where censorship seems to be making a comeback. Eroticism appears stripped bare: it explodes and is contained, squeezed and refined, with that subtle tremor that precedes combustion.

Both the editor, Laia Regincós—winner of this year's Rosa Maria Garriga Awards for lifetime achievement—and the curators make it clear that they prioritize authors with sharp tongues who proclaim the will to approach the other as one might run a fingertip along the edge of a rag, but who can also make it sing. The poems unfold with an optimal balance between tenderness and rapture, between skin and thought, and play with images that seek not to please, but to ignite. Eroticism is not presented as exhibition: it is an exploration of limits—the place where the body ceases to be physical matter and becomes language, promise, and thorn.

Carnality, intimacy, and subtlety

In many poems, the use of the first person is a bold move. There is no distance, no veil: the poetic voice reveals itself with the same insolence as a lightning bolt. But, at the same time, the vulnerability filtered through this voice prevents the eroticism from descending into artifice or vulgarity. It is a desire offered naked, but never naive. The title, A match to the tongueIt functions as a perfect symbol of everything that's brewing: the risk of igniting, the impossibility of uttering anything without seeing a piece of one's own existence consumed, the need to lick the wound after the fire. The book doesn't want to teach anything, it doesn't preach, it simply ignites the space and lets us watch it burn. Nor does it ask for permission: it infiltrates, because poetry, when unleashed, can be as explosive as a match about to explode.

A match to the tongue It is a choral collection that ignites because each poet contributes a different kind of combustion. Idillis has gathered voices that explore desire from complementary registers: explicit carnality, suggested eroticism, emotional intimacy, and symbolic embodiment. The result is a map of desire made of small bonfires, sudden sparks, and slowly burning braziers: Adriana Bàrcia, Raquel Casas, Rosa Font Massot, Lidia Gázquez, Toni R. Juncosa, Cecilia Navarro, Laura G. Ortensi, Jaume C. Pons Alorda, and Laura Adrià Targa. To choose four, Casas writes of eroticism as a trembling fragility: a hesitant lip, a gesture that contracts before daring. Pons Alorda is the exuberance of unleashed desire, of excess and playful delirium. Targa presents her desire as architecture and thought, like someone searching for the inner workings. An intellectual eroticism that reveals, beneath every layer, a subterranean warmth. The skin made landscape is the merit of Rosa Font, who works with desire as part of the nature she inhabits.