I read, with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief, a study that claimed that many people prefer artificial intelligence-generated poetry because they find it more pleasant, clear, and emotive than human poetry. Researchers Brian Porter and Édouard Machery argued in Scientific Reports that, for many readers, these texts even surpassed those of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, or Emily Dickinson.

The Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto (Medellín, 1986) won the Palme d'Or for best short film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival with his master's degree final project at the London Film School, where Carla Simón was one of his classmates. A decade later, the difficulties in making his second film brought about doubts and fear. What if his initial success had been a mirage? Would he end up being just a professor, having been forced to abandon his dream of filmmaking? These concerns ended up being reflected in A Poet, a hilarious and at the same time very bitter comedy that premieres this Friday and has a wonderful protagonist: Óscar Restrepo, a poet who won an important award at a very young age and who, now older and a failure, wallows in his life's defeat through alcohol and self-pity, lives off the pension of an elderly and sick mother, and uses his literary aspirations (“I am a poet!”) as a trench to shelter himself from work. “What you are is unemployed,” his sister rightly tells him, pushing him to accept a job as a literature teacher.

The concern for what can (still) be said is at the heart of this beautiful book, winner of the latest edition of the Carles Riba prize –the first held on a new date–. Let's look at the poem that opens the proceedings, Picking Cherries. The pretext, like most of the pretexts in the poetry of Jaume Coll Mariné (how welcome that is!), comes from country life, from a family coexistence with nature: in this case, a ladder propped against the trunk of a cherry tree, which has remained there after the harvest, done months before. That ladder, which at an inopportune time no longer serves any purpose, “I wish it would mean something.” Perhaps like poetry. Further on, we find a poem of a more ideological nature –which, in the final notes, the author acknowledges as “an attempt to read some of the ways of doing of [Pere] Gimferrer.” It repeats the verse five times: “We no longer know what to call it.” And it is done to insist on all that is falling apart for us: “Nothing is more rotten today / than walking with the name of Spain”; and, a few verses later: “All of Catalonia is a shell / a cracked husk / Nothing is more rotten today.”

In a slightly more just world, the jury of the award to which Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960) submitted El pit adormit at the end of 2024 would have proclaimed her book as the winner. It didn't happen that way, but the work has finally seen the light of day: in almost 500 pages of impressive intensity and ambition, the poet –author of some twenty volumes, including Haikús del camioner (Empúries, 1999) and El guant de plàstic rosa (Edicions 62, 2016)– combines various narrative threads, such as the detection and evolution of the cancer that was diagnosed five years ago, the chronicle of how Catalan poetry was reborn in the late nineties thanks to an alternative circuit of readings, reflections on misogyny – that of the past and that of the present – and fragments in which family memories intertwine with a passion for reading and writing.

Rosa Font Massot He hasn't been far off the mark, and has set out to write about desire. About sexual desire, urgent and vital, but also about the spiritual desire for creation, the desire to sing. And, furthermore, about the desire to forget our dying condition, to change our perspective, to contemplate ourselves from the outside, or from very high above, as suggested by the verses of Iorgos Seferis that head the last canto of this poem: "Under the sky, we are the fish and the trees." About the desire to understand life from its origin, without the mediation—and the extreme, intimate complication—of consciousness. It is, for all these reasons, an ambitious book: "The Poem of Desire "It aims to be the construction of a literary space where amorous desire is a fusion with the world and with all that we perceive and are."

Being reborn after an accident: it sounds like a cliché, but we can't forget that clichés are often deeply ingrained truths. Or, at least, rhetorical fossils with a kernel of truth at their core. Just ask economist and writer Fernando Trias de Bes, who about a year and a half ago suffered a serious car accident that could have killed him, but from which he emerged reborn and creatively liberated.

Visibly moved, Ribas explains that this is how she discovered the poet Suzuki Shizuko, a woman who, in post-World War II Japan under US occupation, broke with the rules of haiku and "made it her refuge." Shizuko was little known even in her own country, partly due to a reluctance to acknowledge the institutionalized sexual violence of the postwar years. The co-director of the Pepe Sales Festival had to undertake an exhaustive search to be able to read her work. She consulted newspaper archives and came across a symposium featuring Jaime Lorente, a writer and professor from Toledo, passionate about haiku and Japanese culture. He had self-published a translation of Shizuko's haiku, which, far from simply describing landscapes, beauty, and seasons in a traditional style, championed a fiercely independent poetry in the first person, achieving the remarkable ferocity of creating beauty in a harsh life and climate.

The poet Laia Llobera (Barcelona, ​​1983) has immersed herself in 12th-century Occitania in every sense in Saur (Proa), winner of the 2025 Miquel de Palol Poetry Prize. Llobera, who holds a doctorate in Catalan language and literature and degrees in translation and interpreting and in religious studies, not only rediscovers the voice of troubadours but also explores questions about the earth, in its most sensual and ancestral sense, death, origins, death, origins, preceded.

A complete and invaluable collection of lyrical works by a major voice in Catalan literary expression of the last fifty years; an author who had published with Tres i Quatre and Llibres del Mall, prestigious publishing houses that have done immense work in disseminating poetry... Gaspar Jaén Urban (Elche, 1952) presents his lyrical corpus since 1975. We should see him everywhere, giving excellent interviews; literary critics could seize the opportunity to review his work and discuss it extensively; bookstores should be vying to stock this volume... Will any of this happen? I'd bet my left hand it won't. It doesn't matter, but: Guadalajara has loved us!

Periphery_ From Latin peripherīa, and this, from Greek peripheria. Extremities or margins of any entity. Anthropology F. A discipline that studies human beings from a social and cultural perspective, the essence of humanity and their place in the world. Border FThe boundary between two closely related things. The blurred line between belief and superstition. Bordering_ adjAdjacent, territory that is touching the limits or borders of another territory. Satellite_ mThat depends on an external influence. Satellite city. Threshold_ m. Extreme value of a magnitude that, when exceeded, changes the characteristics of the established system. Outskirts_ m. Periphery of a city. Metropolis_ Main city of a region, of a state. Anarchism_ mA social theory that, based on the principle of individual freedom, advocates the abolition of all forms of political power. Libertarian_ Supporter of the ideology and attitudes proposed by anarchism. Emma Goldman_ F. A key anarchist in the development of anarchist philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. Return_ m. The act of returning to the place from which one had departed.

The definition of painting offered by Maurice Dennis, artist and art critic, a practitioner and theorist of the Nabis's colorful symbolism in the effervescent France of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is quite famous: "Painting, before being a horse, a female nude, or any other motif, is essentially a flat surface with colors." The poems of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Worcester, 1911–Boston, 1979) have made me think of Dennis's definition. They are words upon words, verses upon verses, unfolding across the page with such a scrupulous blend of meticulousness and density that it is often difficult even to see or understand the poems' themes. We see the colors, not the horse or the female nude.

We will conclude with a poem by Carlos Fages de Climent (1902-1968), an honorable citizen of Castelló d'Empúries, the town of my paternal lineage. Fages, now fully recognized, wrote the poem on a date I cannot specify. New anthem in the Empordà...a region that had traditionally been federalist and is now primarily pro-independence: the ebb and flow of ideas. I myself—if you'll allow me to speak in the first person today, which I hate as much as Pascal:Le moi est haïsable"I would go with my father or uncle, the heir to the farmhouse, to visit Can Canet's bookstore on the Rambla in Figueres, where a gang of 'lifelong federalists' secretly met in the back room of the establishment, hidden only by a flimsy curtain, in a dim light. In later decades, they talked about politics, and that's how I acquired the foundations of what could be called my approach to it: the opinions of others, tolerance, no animosity towards the various peoples of Catalonia and Spain, and an unyielding sense of fraternity with all beings capable of speech. That's why we federated it. Fascinating; today I would only exchange it for a just, effective, and friendly confederation."

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.

One of the best-known poems of Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is the one titled Digging (Digging), the first canonical piece in his songbook. The son of generations of Irish peasants, young Seamus must have been the first to break with the family's farming tradition. "Between my index finger and thumb / rests the stubby quill," this poem begins. And it ends in the same way, but with the addition of a final line: "I'll use it for digging." It's not an original theme for Heaney: without straying from his own tradition, we could recall the illustrious poet and mud-dugman Verdaguer (who, in fact, was a poet by vocation and only, if anything, a mud-dugman by family origin). Or, even more so, that prodigy by Guerau de Liost entitled Obaga de pechoswhose last verses I hesitate to reproduce, because they convey an emotion very close to that of the Irish Nobel laureate of 1995: "The shade grows little by little, overcoming / the dangers of dryness and fleas. / My father used to say, his lips now confiding, / 'Grandfather planted the shade / and you will cut it down.' / And I say: 'Oh, the! / What will be my endeavor?'

The dishes served at the Miramar restaurant in Llançà begin with scraps of paper, which chef Paco Pérez collects here and there and repurposes. Small works of art that eventually emerge from the paper to become edible sculptures, with flavor, aroma, and, above all, soul. Paco Pérez, with five Michelin stars, two of them for the cuisine he creates at Miramar, is considered the quintessential artist-chef. "He's always drawing. In a process of daily creativity, he captures each idea in a sketch on paper, to be interpreted and transformed by his team into a dish that often conveys the essence of the Mar de Amunt to the diner," explains the chef's son, the poet Guillem Pérez. Creating from the raw materials provided by the land he loves so much and that inspires him so much is one of Paco Pérez's obsessions, and he demonstrates this with gastronomic offerings such as Arroz en la Barca, inspired by rice dishes that were cooked "on the high seas, without seeing land, breathing the salty air that makes me feel it." Paco Pérez champions the presence in haute cuisine of the humble seaweed found in the waters of the Mar de Amunt, which embrace the Cape of Creus up to Cervera.

"A nothing / we were, we are, we will be / still, in flower: / that of nothing, the / Rose of Nobody." These verses from the third stanza of the poem Psalm contain the title of what is one of the capital books of Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose (1963). The Catalan version of Nobody's Rose, Now published in a bilingual edition, with a translation and commentary edited by Arnau Pons, by LaBreu Edicions, it allows us to read and get to know in depth one of the essential books of German and universal poetry of the 20th century.

In Take up your cross, new collection of poems byAntonia Vicens (Santanyí, 1941), "echoes of a bloody battle are felt everywhere," tanks advance with solitary executioners inside, and birds of prey "tear out the eyes of combatants" to make their nests. The omnipresence of struggle, blood, and war coexists with the human spirit of survival and the vindication of words like "redemption" and "memory." Once again, the Mallorcan author manages to move the reader with a compact and dense collection of verses published by LaBreu, as well as All the horses (2017) and Father, what do we do with the dead mother? (2020).

The poet and translator Mary de Rachewiltz celebrated her centenary this week at Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian Tyrol, where she has lived for decades. Author of poetry collections such as Whose world? (1998) and childhood memories Discretions (1971), Mary de Rachewiltz has also stood out for having translated into Italian the work of her father, Ezra Pound, collected in The Cantos (1985) and Venetian songs (2001).

Although the older poets are often "an inexhaustible source of profound reflections and valuable thoughts," the younger poets take a different tack. "They don't usually believe much in sacredness or human institutions," they are attracted to "passionate feelings, such as deep and irreconcilable loves or hatreds," and "have little or no idea whether they will one day become classics or whether their writings will serve as a model for future generations." These are the initial considerations that are made. Jaume Juan Castelló, translator and professor at the Department of Latin Philology at the University of Barcelona, about Catullus, one of the wildest Latin authors, who has just presented a new Catalan version ofThe poems in Adesiara.

Today I begin with some uncomfortable data: 25% of the adult population has suffered physical abuse in childhood, and 18% of girls and 8% of boys have suffered sexual abuse (UNICEF, 2017). Polish psychoanalyst Alice Miller delved into the concept of Black pedagogy, which she defines as a parenting model based on emotional repression, humiliation, and uncritical obedience, where violence (physical, verbal, or symbolic) is presented as necessary for education. This pedagogy not only wounds, but teaches us to justify the wound ("They did it for my own good," "The standards of the time were different"), and in this way, the pain is buried under a layer of loyalty, and the cycle of violence can perpetuate itself unchallenged.