"Clementina Arderiu Voltas is probably one of the Catalan writers who has had the easiest and most difficult time leaving a work in the history of Catalan literature." With this forceful statement begins the profile that Marta Pessarrodona outlined the poet in the volume Donasses. Protagonists of modern Catalonia (Destination, 2006). Now that the fiftieth anniversary of Arderiu's death is being celebrated, it is worth asking what the reasons are for this contradictory situation – in the light and in the shadow at the same time – and trying to rectify the wrong done to his work, on which reductive judgments have weighed, for social and biographical reasons.

Perhaps because he won the last Jocs Florals prize with the book Descripció del món (Godall), Martí Sales (Barcelona, 1979) meets us in the garden of the Muñoz Ramonet Foundation, an oasis of trees, plants, and sculptural fountains that opened to the public ten years ago. A poet, narrator, translator, and singer – he was part of the fondly remembered Surfing Sirles – Sales received the prestigious award at the Saló de Cent of Barcelona City Council, where he took the opportunity to hand out leaflets to attendees in case they wanted to collaborate financially "with the struggle of the Vallcarca neighborhood against gentrification" and so that some residents could "wipe out the disproportionate fines from the police persecution to which the current council subjects them, while saying that the most important axis of its program is the right to housing".

To show, of Paul Éluard (1895-1952), is a collection of prose poems, lectures, writings on art, and texts dedicated to his painter friends. Published in 1939, the title summarizes Éluard's aesthetic project: poetry should not describe the world, but reveal and transform it. The poet is not a passive observer, but someone capable of penetrating appearances and discovering hidden relationships between objects, beings, and feelings. Linked to the surrealism ofAndré Breton, Éluard evolves here towards a more human and communicative poetry. To show is a borderland work between dream and reality, between image and idea, between amorous intimacy and collective consciousness.The central theme is the gaze. For Éluard, to see is not just to perceive, but to understand. He reorganizes reality with unexpected associations, surprising metaphors, and free images. Everyday objects acquire a new symbolic force, and the boundaries between matter and emotion dissolve. Poetry regains the capacity to marvel and suggests that only those who know how to look poetically are truly free. This principle also structures the book: there is no linear narrative, but fragments guided by intuitions and sudden illuminations. An almost hypnotic fluidity

Writing is based on free surrealist association, but Éluard adds more lyricism to it than other authors of the movement. His metaphors do not seek hermeticism, but an immediate emotional truth. From this is born the extraordinary musicality of his poetry. The rhythm, repetitions, and sound variations create an almost hypnotic fluidity, as if dictated by an inner current deeper than ordinary logic. The language is both simple and mysterious. Love occupies a central place and becomes a force of universal transformation. The feminine figure acts as a mediator between the poet and the world: she is not only an object of desire, but also a revealing presence. Body, nature, light, and time merge into a deeper reality. The boundaries between subject and object disappear. Despite the lyrical dimension, the book reflects an ethical and political concern. In the European context of the 1930s, marked by fascism and the imminence of war, Éluard defends the freedom of the spirit and human dignity. Poetic freedom becomes a model for moral and political freedom. Éluard represents a point of balance between aesthetic experimentation and historical responsibility.Friend of painters like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, or Man Ray, Éluard creates poems that function as verbal paintings, full of light, visual contrasts, and spatial forms. Éluard participates in the avant-garde search for a language capable of overcoming traditional divisions between artistic disciplines. Showing is essential to understanding Éluard and modern European poetry. The book remains alive because it raises questions about the gaze, the power of words, and the role of poetry in times of crisis. Éluard is clear: poetry is not an ornament or an escape, but a way to defend human freedom against everything that tries to diminish it.

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Up to now, and for almost thirty years, we have known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, a performer, a lecturer, and a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026), he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of curious technical speculations on poetry writing, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

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88 years ago, the citizens of Barcelona and other Catalan towns looked at the sky with terror. "The terrible hecatomb that punishes Barcelona continues. A couple of thousand victims and more than a hundred buildings destroyed in two days. Panic and horror. Let's all go to Vallirana. The scenes of exodus and sheltering witnessed at the metro stations and platforms are unforgettable," wrote Josep M. López-Picó on March 18, 1938. On Saturday, June 20, however, one will be able to look at the sky with optimism: 100,000 poems will fall. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Franco's death, a helicopter will fly over Plaça Nova and the surroundings of Barcelona Cathedral to drop verses, in Catalan and Spanish, especially from emerging poets.

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For decades, Biel Mesquida (Castelló de la Plana, 1947) has been inviting readers to delve into all the nuances of the "censored perfume" of freedom, whether sexual or political. On the evening he received the 58th Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, the verses of Lluita de classes, one of the agile and radiant poems from El bell país on els homes desitgen els homes –written in 1974 but unpublished until 1985–, once again resonated at the Palau de la Música with the elegant diction of the poet Adrià Targa. "You are a creature, fierce creature, playing with my hips, / biting them, while I knelt, pushed and compelled by your frenzy and / this desire to sink into the beautiful hole of my anus": thus, the urgent connection between the lyrical self and the "disheveled boy" of the commissions still sounds forcefully, an oasis of free love amidst the national-Catholic and Francoist darkness.

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This book —which takes its title from a poem by Joan Vinyoli, a friend of Feliu Formosa— discreetly, yet profoundly, celebrates life. Although it reflects on death and absence, on loss and pain, life weighs more heavily. The poet manages the emotion with which he presents each of the pretexts used to elucidate the theme very well. “Love, desire and dream”, begins poem XXIV, which deals with a love affair. At ninety years old, existence becomes more peremptory than ever, but, as many verses demonstrate, also fully in love. “I never know if I say everything”: one never finishes saying everything, but here Formosa says many things (and, when he doesn't, he suggests them). Memories, desires, impressions. And he inventories many ideas. A very suggestive one is that “to live is to translate / and to translate is to live”.

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Although she has to use crutches due to a recent fall, Marta Pessarrodona (Terrassa, 1941) retains the energy and enthusiasm that have accompanied her for decades. She opens the door to her home in Valldoreix once again to ARA for a double reason: she has been chosen as the opening speaker for the new edition of the Barcelona Poesia festival, which takes place from May 14 to 21, and she is presenting a new poetry book, Re(visions), which is about to hit bookstores. Published by Viena five years after Tot m'admira (2021), it revisits the author's family members, friends, and loves, including her last dog, Queta, who died in an accident just over a year ago.

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It has been twenty years since Jordi Llavina (Gelida, 1968) debuted as a poet with La corda del gronxador (Moll, 2006). The author celebrates the anniversary by selecting his work in verse in El test de la flor malva, published by Pagès: the volume, 200 pages long and with a prologue by Pere Ballart, collects a representative sample of the ten poetry books he has published so far, including Vetlla (3i4, 2012), El magraner (Cossetània, 2020) and Un llum que crema (Proa, 2023).

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The definitive impulse to start writing, a self-confidence therapy, the stimulus to tell that story that is kept in a corner of the soul or a creative activity for an active retirement. The students of the Vicenç Pagès Jordà Writing Room of the Girona City Council are as diverse and heterogeneous as the motivations that have led them to want to write. But all of them, despite their different origins, ages or abilities, are touched by the same passion for writing. And for reading! Since the founder of the school, the late writer from Figueres Vicenç Pagès, did not conceive of one activity without the other.

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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.

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The Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto (Medellín, 1986) won the Palme d'Or for best short film at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival with the final project for the master's degree he was pursuing at the London Film School, where Carla Simón was one of his classmates. A decade later, 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 yet very bitter comedy that premieres this Friday and features 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, ill mother, and uses his literary aspirations (“I am a poet!”) as a trench to shield himself from work. “What you are is an idler,” his sister rightly tells him, pushing him to accept a job as a literature teacher.

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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.”

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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