A favorite Auden poem of Alex Susanna was the elegy in Yeats, where we read that "the words of a dead man/Become the entrails of the living." A severe fate has willed that it is Alex who now must live forever in us, his readers. In the prologue to Body Memory. Complete Poetry (1980-2024) (Viena Edicions, 2025) Jordi Llavina describes it as "the work of a life", but it is much more: it is, as a verse of the poem says Still life (Blind spots, 2007) "a condensation of life." I will not forget that I met Alex Susanna Twenty years ago when he came to the Autonomous University to explain to us that art is neither fantasy nor invention, but the same reality but invigorated, or - to put it memorably as he did - muscular. As if poetry were a gymnasium in which to stretch words that routine has slackened: the place to maximize, condensed, their power.