Yolanda Castaño

- Spain -

Poet, essayist, editor and curator Yolanda Castaño is director of her own international writer’s residence in Galicia. The most international name in Galician contemporary poetry, she is the winner of Spanish National Award for Poetry 2023, highest honor for a poet in Spain. She has published eight poetry collections in Galician and Spanish, but also solo poetry volumes in English, Italian, French, Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, Catalan, Asturian, Greek, Polish and Armenian, apart from shorter samples of her work in other 30 different languages.

She has participated in festivals and literary manifestations all over more than 40 countries of Europe, America, Asia and Africa. Two times Winner of the National Critics Award, the Ojo Crítico (best poetry book by a young author in Spain), the Estandarte Award (best poetry collection in Spain in 2020) or Galician Culture Award among many others. She has been awarded international fellowships as a writer-in-residence in Greece, Germany, China, Scotland, Spain, Finland, California, Turkey and France.

She is also the author of translations, non-fiction, literary editions, history of Galician Poetry and seven poetry books for children. She regularly organizes festivals, literary and translation workshops and readings series, all of them hosting local to international poets since 2009. She has mixed poetry with music, visual arts, video, architecture, cookery, film in 360º, comic and dance.

Yolanda Castaño (Santiago de Compostela, 1977) is one of the most acclaimed and distinctive voices in poetry in Spain today.

Visor Libros
Back-cover text for La falsa autónoma (May 2026)

Selected Critical Reception

Quite simply, La falsa autónoma is a dazzling book. Amid its author’s bleak scepticism, genuine poetry pulses through it, surprising the speechless reader with every line.

Luis María Ansón
El Cultural, 31 July 2026

With La falsa autónoma, Yolanda Castaño has once again surpassed herself—and has done so with the natural assurance that has characterised her entire literary career. Decades of working with language and searching for the exact expression have given us a new example of her supreme economy of means. […] It is a testament to her profound literary commitment, because to turn precarity into poetry requires relinquishing a certain aesthetic comfort: looking away from where the light falls in order to confront the shadows.

Seegall Hermida
Diario SEGRE, DIS supplement, 26 July 2026

A dazzling book, as one would expect from the author of Elevar as pálpebras, O libro da egoísta and Materia. Drawing on her own experience of work and daily life, she constructs a singular epic of existing and resisting in a world intent on reducing people to mere products. […] Always deeply personal, Yolanda Castaño’s song becomes a song of us all whenever she sees herself reflected in others. […] La falsa autónoma touches perhaps the rawest nerve of the most consequential issue of our time.

Carlos Aganzo
El Norte de Castilla, “Los libros”, 12 July 2026

Across these thirty years of poetry and history, Yolanda Castaño has emerged as a pivotal figure. Even if the field were narrowed to only a handful of names, her place would remain difficult to contest. Yolanda made the invisible visible. She continues to do so. Through painstaking effort, perseverance, brilliance and an unfailingly ironic smile, she has succeeded, decade after decade—no small feat—in opening eyes one by one, raising one eyelid after another. Such is the magnitude of her work.

Ismael Ramos
Poet and recipient of Spain’s National Prize for Young Poetry
Presentation, March 2025

[Yolanda Castaño] reaffirms her canonical place in contemporary Galician poetry, thanks to her evident “mastery of surprise” (Requeixo, 2019), expressed through work that is both genuinely original and consistently revolutionary.

Teresa Seara
Literary critic
Review in Galicia 21

The subversion of form is inseparable from the unorthodoxy of content. In Materia, Yolanda Castaño champions an anti-patriarchal choice—the decision not to become a mother—alongside several anti-normative positions: defiance of the social conventions of post-war Francoist Spain and rebellion against every form of external imposition. […] Castaño affirms “dissent”, “independence”, “scandal” and “emancipation” as desirable foundations for a life.

Materia has just received both the Critics’ Prize for the best poetry collection written in Galician and Spain’s National Poetry Prize. My congratulations to Yolanda on this deeply affecting collection.

Ariadna G. García
Poet and literary critic
Review in Revista Turia, nos. 149–150

On Materia

A powerful poetic work in which each state of matter finds its own tone, through poems […] that look simultaneously towards the avant-garde and towards origins, with extraordinary evocative and sensory force.

Metaphorical poetry that engages with both personal and collective memory while remaining direct, radical and feminist. It explores—without complacency—subjects such as motherhood, family and social convention, drawing reality out of its habitual haze and giving it concrete form in language.

Jury statement for Spain’s National Poetry Prize

The jury highlighted the material force of the vocabulary, its evocative and sensory power, and the effectiveness with which its playful and ironic possibilities are explored. The jury also praised the collection’s insurrection against a motif with a long tradition in Galician poetry: the house, which is renounced because it is also a prison. Finally, the force with which the collection addresses the right not to become a mother—in a cultural context that exalts and idealises motherhood—should be understood within its female and feminist vision of identity as the inseparable union of body and mind.

Jury statement for the Spanish Critics’ Prize

A kind of autobiography that transcends the personal to speak of us all, in a free language shaped by the legacy of the avant-garde.

A true poet: ingenious and profound, with a powerful, modern voice—without question one of the most poetic voices of our time.

Túa Blesa, literary critic
Review in El Cultural

Astute, precise and, at times, courageously uncompromising.

Lorena Souto, poet and literary theorist
Speech marking the award of the Spanish Critics’ Prize

The path traced by this Materia leaves well-trodden places and complacent rituals behind; it desacralises institutions and the structures that perpetuate them, rewrites equations and longs for a gale. Defiant in the face of our times, the poet escapes comfortable patterns and verses, turns the crank once more and brings forth a different diction. No longer content with the grid that dictates where her foot must land in a game of hopscotch, the poem draws another map—perhaps a sphere—and declares: “my hidden daughter: your future lies behind you.”

Ana Romaní, poet, journalist and recipient of Spain’s National Prize for Cultural Journalism
Back-cover text for Visor’s bilingual edition

Legacies, relationships and even family projections: this is the matter of which we are made. It appears in a liquid form capable of moistening ancestral roots; in the solidity of what shapes us today, even when only a fragment rises into view; and in the gaseous volatility of an imagined family future. From historical memory to the ambiguities surrounding the decision not to become a mother, these themes are explored in a powerful poetic work in which each state of matter finds its own tone.

Xerais
Back-cover text for the original edition

Earlier Critical Reception

Of all the poetry being written on the Iberian Peninsula today, perhaps none possesses the vitality, range and renewing force of Galician poetry. It seems to have understood perfectly that only the periphery can be the site of the true avant-garde, and that renewal is possible only by embracing the canon of modernity—not by trying to climb onto it, but by engaging with it as an equal. […] A segunda lingua is Yolanda Castaño’s sixth poetry collection (Santiago de Compostela, 1977), following such essential titles as her previous book, Profundidade de campo (2007).

Yolanda Castaño possesses a profound understanding of the new directions in European poetry […] and also knows that poetry is almost always found outside poems. She therefore does not hesitate to seek it in other arts before bringing it into her own. Above all, however, her poetry is a profound exercise in self-knowledge. I use the word “self” deliberately, because for her the “I” encompasses every grammatical person, every being and all matter: she knows that to speak of bread is to engage in politics, and that nothing is more intimate than the way we inhabit the multitude.

[…]

Among the many reasons Yolanda Castaño’s poetry stands out in its own right within the matriarchy of Galician poetry of her generation—and, by extension, within poetry more broadly—the most important, to my mind, is her ability to walk the slender wire that both separates and connects the contemporary poem and performative experience. This ability arises from her recognition that autobiography is as essential to the poem as it is to performance, because it is precisely this autobiographical element that connects the artwork to politics in general and to each of its particular dimensions, from a feminist vision to every other aspect of being alive in the world today. […] Profundidade de campo, Yolanda Castaño’s most recent book, dispenses with nonsense and plunges deep into the mire of identity: it speaks of identity without concealment and seeks to understand how we see ourselves, how others see us and how that reflection shapes us. Yolanda Castaño performs an autopsy on herself while still alive and without anaesthesia. She brings together the finest elements of the literary and performative traditions and takes a further step in the sequence of transformations that has shaped Western poetry: from hero to victim to witness; from history to autobiography; from autobiography to performance.

Martín López-Vega
Rima Interna

Galician poetry written by women has undergone an unprecedented revolution in recent decades. The periphery has thus redefined an often monolithic centre, opening up a bold and radical horizon from which to reconsider poetic practice. Yolanda Castaño is one of its most prominent and acclaimed voices, capable of establishing—and inventing—an identity understood as a flow of visual images traversed by contradiction.

Antonio Ortega
Babelia, El País

This book further confirms the exceptional quality of Yolanda Castaño’s writing, demonstrating both her gift for reframing questions central to literature and the individual, and her ability to articulate them in a modern and compelling language.

Túa Blesa
El Cultural

The shots and reverse shots of Profundidad de campo reveal a poetic personality in motion and define one of the most remarkable individual voices of her literary generation. Yolanda Castaño incorporates the visual codes of our time into her singular aesthetic universe.

Luís Bagué Quílez
Adarve

As a poet of her time, Yolanda Castaño’s work displays many elements of postmodernity—understood here less as a cynical or calculated stance than as a condition that invites the opening of unexpected perspectives. Castaño enters into dialogue with her time and with the scars left by the course of history, but she does so visually, sublimating the gruesome and tempering it through a precise use of parody and an elegant, playful handling of theme and style. […] The Galician poet succeeds in uniting the supposedly trivial with the elevated, bringing both into a recognisable stylistic unity through the gentle elegance with which she expresses ideas and emotions of striking force and suggestive power. […] Castaño skilfully weaves the materials of the present into outstanding poems—something immediately apparent as soon as we enter the exuberant forest of her lyrical temperament.

Diego Vadillo
Niram Art

The author does not impose her gaze or interpretation of the world upon her readers. Her poems do not make assertions; they ask questions. The book’s aesthetics arise from this critical, ideological intent. Its discourse is presented in fragments because life cannot be named. Reality is multiple and exists in a continuous state of crisis and transformation, while language has no direct access to it. Winner of RNE’s 2009 Ojo Crítico Prize, Profundidad de campo establishes its author, on its own merits, as one of the most significant poets of the twenty-first century. Its aesthetic and ideological challenge leaves no one indifferent. Those who have read it know this.

Ariadna G. García
La tormenta en un vaso

Profundidad de campo is an intelligent manifesto against a limping society: one that is wounded by appearances and fears what it cannot immediately understand (“we distrust the summer”). Yet beyond an ideological discourse that threads together a transcendent politics (“the more invisible it becomes, the more evident it is”), the book also offers a poetics of knowledge: an attempt to investigate and dissect formal layers—and it is no longer only the body that is at stake—and to move beyond the canon.

Sofía Castañón
Poesía Digital

Yolanda Castaño confirms her sincere desire to endow her poetry with a creative idealism that roots our being in the multiplicity and freedom summoned by the word—and that makes us, as she strives to do through her verse, more lyrically human.

Jorge de Arco
Culturamas and Diario de Ávila

Despite her youth, Yolanda Castaño is an indispensable voice in contemporary poetry, in both Galician and Spanish. […] Yolanda Castaño has established herself as one of the most outstanding voices of her generation.

Raquel Lanseros
Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos

The body is the body and language is language: La segunda lengua unfolds where the two collide, amid words that scrape against one another and skin that cannot quite touch. Yolanda Castaño—a free poet who has experimented with every language that appeals to every sense: the written, the heard, the seen and even the known—concludes that perhaps we lack the verb needed to name what must be named, or quite the opposite: that the world is suffocating beneath too many different voices. La segunda lengua reflects on writing and its tension with life, on writing as a way of life and on writing as a parallel life. It takes us on a beautiful and unflinching journey through questions that offer more doubt than certainty: What is language for? What is the body for? What space lies between them, and why not inhabit it?

Elena Medel
Back-cover text for La segunda lengua

Yolanda Castaño’s poetry has not gone unnoticed: it has attracted prizes and critical acclaim since her first book, and particularly since the publication of Vivimos no ciclo das erofanías (1998), which she translated into Spanish herself, as she has her subsequent collections. These are outstanding texts in both the first and the second language.

Túa Blesa
El Cultural

Yolanda Castaño has given form to her discerning reflections on the enigmatic and evocative realm of language. Her verse continues to be structured around deeper meditation and sustained authenticity. There is no renunciation in her voice, but rather serene contemplation—a certainty that enters into dialogue with the everyday life of language.

Jorge de Arco
“La sombra del Ciprés”, El Norte de Castilla

La segunda lengua offers threefold cause for celebration: first, because a work that deserves to be known here and everywhere is now available in translation; second, because it confirms the necessary recognition of a voice that has done so much to bring our literature to audiences within and beyond Galicia, building bridges of the greatest variety and originality; and finally, because we all benefit from seeing our literature—regardless of who writes it—as a prodigal child travelling the world and making us proud.

Armando Requeixo
“Nordesía”, El Ideal Gallego

La segunda lengua reads as Yolanda Castaño’s most tranquil and serene book. In contrast to the volcanic lines of Vivimos en el ciclo de las Erofanías or the frenzied searching of El libro de la egoísta, two of her earlier works, La segunda lengua seems to inhabit the realm of observation: Yolanda Castaño looks, considers and then writes. […]

In La segunda lengua, Yolanda Castaño creates several books within a single book, just as one word can offer several different meanings.

Yolanda Castaño (Santiago de Compostela, 1977) marks twenty years of publishing poetry originally written in Galician. Her six collections to date have earned her awards including the Spanish Critics’ Prize, the Espiral Maior Poetry Prize, the Ojo Crítico Prize and the Novacaixagalicia Prize.

Estandarte

For those unfamiliar with Castaño, one might mention that she has won some of Spain’s most important awards; that, from a very young age, her complete body of work has been published by Visor; and that she has been invited to prestigious festivals in countries as distant as India. […] Miriam Reyes and Yolanda Castaño are the two most important poets of their generation.

Luna Miguel
Playground

Reading Yolanda Castaño’s poems makes me think that she has found an intriguing and highly individual way of circumnavigating—or simply evading—various categories: those hedges planted in poetry’s gardens by critics, theorists and other tedious people. She writes love poems that are never tearful. Her love belongs to mysterious strangers arriving from different continents, and to language—or languages. She writes about language and languages without becoming overly solemn. She is never pedantic. She loves to leap: to leap like girls skipping through a city park, but also to leap between the lines of her poems, between images and metaphors, between honesty and mischief.

A reader may ask: Can’t you choose between these different tones? And the poet replies: No, I cannot. Because this is not a treatise, a school textbook or a scholarly article. It is poetry; it is art. It is about leaping and skipping. About singing at the End of the Earth, in fair weather and foul.

Yolanda’s poems are like champagne, not vodka or other lethal spirits from ash-grey countries.

Read her poems, and you too will leap.

Adam Zagajewski
Foreword to the English edition of A segunda lingua and to the anthology Un cobertizo lleno de significados sospechosos

To say that Yolanda Castaño is the most representative Galician poet of the present moment is an understatement: she is one of the most significant poets of her generation in Spain.

[…]

The author offers readers prose poems, short and long poems, haiku and more, employing images that are invariably evocative. These range from meticulous observations of nature to memories of journeys and cities—those who know or follow her are aware that Yolanda is a tireless traveller who has taken her poetry to almost every corner of the world—from past or longed-for loves to disillusionment with all that surrounds us and the joy of unexpected encounters. […]

In almost every poem, she refuses to relinquish the double meanings concealed in many of her lines. Her subtle irony makes them all the more compelling, while her metaphors always sound fresh and different, far removed from anything we may have read before.

I once heard someone say that it is wonderful to admire those you love, but better still to love those you admire. This is always true of the poet Yolanda Castaño: we admire her as we read her and, when we meet her, inevitably come to care for her. In her case, the person behind the work faithfully reflects the work itself—which is not always true of the writers we encounter along the way. […]

In short, Yolanda Castaño offers us a luminous selection of her work. Her poetry will continue to grow beyond this anthology in the new books her readers always await, as we try to decipher the suspicious meanings concealed beneath this shed overflowing with poetry—with fine poetry.

Javier Bozalongo
InfoLibre

More about the poet

Poetry

MY LONGEST RELATIONSHIP / A MIÑA RELACIÓN MÁIS LONGA

It’s not something I discuss in public, but
I’m in a relationship with my flat.

The neighbors badmouth us because we don’t care how we look,
we put out the trash whenever we want, and
we’re constantly collecting
things that are broken.

I know she needs a new coat of paint.
—Her roots are showing.—
That sometimes she dons old-fashioned clothes,
that I could do things that would make her look better.
Yet together we reminisce
about certain visitors in silence,
and she shows me each
threshold where I stumbled.

In our intimacy, there’s always one airless room.

We guard the secret of that dirty corner,
we keep forgotten toys,
and there’s one drawer we’ll never, ever open.

She knows everything about me, my flat.
We play with silly things that
don’t belong elsewhere anymore.
Once in a while we pleasure each other.

Sometimes her love is harsh: over the years I’ve learned that
central heating would numb me to the dangers of
creature comforts.
Stubborn little thing! Are you implying that loving you
means I’ll never have a moment’s rest?

Like any other couple, we thrive together.
The elevator is so new it sometimes blinds me,
sometimes shutting as I enter, just so I don’t
forget those years of exertion.

I know she loves me, too:
that when I lose patience and choose to descend the stairs
an automatic door opens
to remind me gravity isn’t
always on our side.

She knows more about my body than anyone.
She, too, takes me in her arms when I’m lost,
I have whimpered each one of my fears at her breast.

For her, I gave everything I once had.
She married all my faults,
and I made her a home.
Translated by Samantha Schnee
Non é algo para contar en público, pero
teño unha relación coa miña casa.

Os veciños critícannos porque non nos amañamos,
sacamos o lixo a deshoras, e
sempre hai algo xa roto
que seguimos a atesourar.

Sei que iría necesitando outra man de pintura.
–Vénselle as raíces–
Que loce ás veces roupa anticuada,
que aínda hai unha reforma que non lle viría mal.
Pero xuntas rememoramos
certas visitas en silencio,
e ela ponme en fronte dos ollos
cada aresta en que tropecei.

Sempre hai, na intimidade, un cuarto mal ventilado.

Protexemos o segredo daquela esquiniña sucia,
gardamos xoguetes inservibles,
e hai un caixón que non abrimos xamais.

Sábeo todo de min a miña casa.
Divírtennos obxectos parvos que
xa non casan con nada.
Frotámonos a unha á outra de cando en vez.

Outras, o seu amor é severo: cos anos entendín que
unha calefacción central non me alertaría dos perigos da
confortabilidade.
Pequena testalana!: queres dicir que quererte
non ha deixarme nunca descansar?

Coma toda parella, prosperamos xuntas.
O ascensor é tan novo que ás veces me cega,
outras mórdeme cando entro, só para que nunca
esqueza os anos de esforzo.

Eu sei que tamén me ama:
que cando perdo a paciencia e quero baixar axiña polas escaleiras
unha porta automática se abre
para dicirme que non sempre
a gravidade se pon do noso lado.

Sabe do meu corpo máis do que ninguén.
Tamén ela me colle nos seus brazos cando me perdo,
chorei no seu colo cada un dos espantos.

Dei por ela, unha vez, todo canto tiña.
Ela casou coas miñas faltas,
eu deille a ela un fogar.
WHEEL OF FORTUNE / A RODA DA FORTUNA

There are women who, upon the bright star of each twenty-eighth day,
receive a stream of liquidity in their accounts,
endometrial or financial,
a blessed
            hemorrhage of cash.

I, on the other hand, have
a costly hypothesis:
each menstrual cycle is one of pointless nostalgia—
a broken necklace of infinitesimal un-births
not this one, or this one, or this other one, or that one…
all those cells waiting just to rush
headlong into dying so easily,
my embryonic failures, I
build a nest to curl up close with them
I’m left alone and, softly, I whisper to my ovaries:
Couldn’t you
produce
            something more useful?

I swallow a pill
and make haste to desecrate myself.
Translated by Samantha Schnee
Hai mulleres que, co luceiro de cada día vinte oito,
báixalles un caudal de liquidez ás súas contas,
endometrio ou salario,
unha bendita
                     hemorraxia de billetes.

A min, porén, píngame
unha gravosa hipótese
–cada ciclo menstrual é unha inútil nostalxia–
ábreseme un colar de diminutos abortos
este non, este tampouco, nin este outro, nin este...
todos eses xermes facendo quenda para precipitarse
intentando morrer e non lles custa
meus embrionarios fracasos, eu
fago un niño para me recostar con eles
quedo a soas e, en baixiño, besbéllolles aos meus ovarios:
non podedes
                        segregar
                                          algo máis produtivo?

Trago unha pastilla
e corro a abusar de min mesma.
SUSPENDED / SUSPENDIDA

No sooner has the animal of night mated with the planet,
than I imagine all that might have been.

A nation of birds will be on the other side
if at last you decide to emigrate.
Yes—I say—and I will never, ever return
to the golden shores of my hapless homeland.

Look now at this breast that will not reproduce.

Somewhere, someplace,
perhaps you are walking, daughter, with the girl I once was, who died.
Perhaps Jizo and his children of mist
walk with you, hand in hand.
But you wander, falling behind time, and cannot find me.
Ethereal and eternal, silent sphere;
thousands of unborn beings seeking
the breasts of their mothers in the dark.
Moving through fog with shining eyes,
swimming in the shadows, wondering aloud.
Yet you don’t find me, my daughter.

I can’t make my l’s give you eyelashes,
or my periods give you freckles.
My poems don’t pull at my sweater,
they won’t awaken me, frightened, in the middle of the night.

And my humble homeland and its golden shores.

Your face falls apart as if in slow motion,
you’ve been falling apart since I turned seventeen.
I’ve been unbuttoning your muscles,
unpicking your stitches.

Daughter, o daughter of mine: I cannot clasp you to my breast.

Remain where you are, stay calm.
Descending the stairway of lines in this poem,
in the faint voice threaded through these verses,
I’ll speak to your unborn self even when I’m dead.
I’m taking apart your features,
untying them thread by thread,
to make you a world where nothing can harm us.

Stop wandering and sleep, we’ll find each other there.
I have nothing, I ask for nothing.
A fleeting glimmer and then nothing.
Translated by Samantha Schnee
En canto o animal da noite se aparea co planeta
podo aventurarme a ver o que podería ser.

Un país de paxaros estará do outro lado
se te embarcas en ser por fin esa emigrante.
Si –digo eu– e non regresarei máis nunca
ás costas douradas do meu precario país.

Contempla agora o peito que non ha reproducirse.

Nalgún lugar, nunha esfera,
talvez esteas andando, filla, coa nena que fun e que morreu.
Talvez Jizo e os nenos da auga
estean da man a camiñar contigo.
Só ti vagas por detrás do tempo e non logras encontrarme.
Va e perenne, esfera quieta;
miles de seres non nacidos buscan
entre as sombras os seos das súas nais.
Avanzan entre a néboa cos ollos acendidos,
bracean dende o escuro, preguntan en voz alta.
Pero ti non me encontras, filla miña.

Non podo imitar os meus eles para debuxarche as pestanas,
nin un punto e seguido para poñerche un lunar.
Os meus poemas non me tiran do xersei,
nin me erguerán ás tres da mañá presas do pánico.

E o meu pobre país e as súas costas douradas.

O teu rostro derrúbase como a cámara lenta,
levas derrubándote dende que teño dezasete.
Vouche desabotoando os músculos,
destrenzando os teus tecidos.

Filla, filla miña: non podo cargarte no meu colo.

Fica onde estás, queda tranquila.
Baixando polos chanzos das liñas deste poema,
apenas na voz ganduxada neste verso,
falareille aínda morta a unha ti non nacida.
Vouche destecendo os trazos,
fibra a fibra desanoo,
e fago para ti unha esfera onde nada pode ferirnos.

Deixa de camiñar e durme, que alí nos encontraremos.
Nada teño e nada pido.
Un fulgor inasible e logo nada.
Asking again / VOLTA A PEDIR

I’m not asking it to overcome, at once,
blue starling nausea,
not asking it to clamber from the fatherland’s sewers.
Not asking it to endure, to keep time or hold a tune.
Not asking it to be balanced or gradual,
not to replicate a moral existence
or to calculate precisely the toasts of Europe,
not asking it to be both subtle and unanimous,
not asking it to contribute, appease, restore,
not asking for achievement
or for silence.

I am only asking
please
let it be
cheaper.
Translated by James Appleby
Non lle pido que supere, dun brinco, a náusea azul
coma estorniños,
non lle pido que remonte os sumidoiros da patria.
Non lle pido que aguante, que mida e mais que entoe.
Non lle pido que sexa nivelado, paulatino.
Non lle pido que replique unha existencia moral,
nin que poida cifrar todos os brindes de Europa.
Que sexa ao mesmo tempo unánime e sutil,
non lle pido que propicie, aplaque, reivindique.
Non lle pido que logre,
non lle pido que cale.

Só lle pido que sexa
máis
barato.
Wheels of Obedience / NORIAS DE OBEDIENCIA

Like the mechanical arm of the dawn.
Like a vertical assembly-line organ.
Like a stubborn mine, a fishing hole, a lathe.
Rotation and press, your wheel of obedience.

Every quarter-hour, the crank of extraction.
Like steam-engine provinces,
like hierarchy and forge.

The night wrote me its contract, like it would a forest.

In the morning, at midday, through afternoon,
when our favour stalks us open-eyed.

Like an emporium,
like a chain,
I have
to be
productive.
Translated by James Appleby
Coma o brazo mecánico da alborada.
Coma un órgano vertical, manufactura.
Coma minas tenaces, caladoiro, un torno.
Coma prensa e rotación, a súa noria de obediencia.

A cada cuarto de hora a manivela da obtención.
Coma provincias a vapor,
coma fragua e xerarquía.

A noite deume emprego, como a un bosque.

Polas mañás, ao mediodía, á tarde,
á hora en que o favor axexa os ollos espertos.

Coma emporios,
coma cadeas,
teño que ser
produtiva.
Testament / TESTAMENTO

I had never thought of death
but I sold my teeth and bought a house.

Early mornings bloated
as a washed pig bladder.
Hormone harvest. Burden, oxygen.
Belonging to loss
versus losing belongings.

The idea of non-being came with my possessions.

The only treasure map
is not needing one.
Translated by James Appleby
Nunca pensara na morte
pero vendín os meus dentes e merquei unha casa.

Inflábase a madrugada
coma a lavada vexiga dun porco.
A hormona da colleita. Rémora e osíxeno.
Foi pertencer á perda
contrario a perder pertenza.

A idea de non ser chegou co posuído.

O único mapa do tesouro
era non necesitalo.
POETRY IS A MINORITIZED LANGUAGE / A POESÍA É UNHA LINGUA MINORIZADA

I would start with its breadth. Acidity, pH.

It walks like a woman:
between the massacre of the unseen
and the concentration camp of visibility.

It bellows style and polish,
a neighbourly epic.

In the poem, language
falls on its own deaf ears,
the words amplify
their circle of friends.

You need to frig the alphabet
till it spouts
unlikely links

The changing gears of chatter,
the tell of another order.
The mosquito’s smile in the amber.

It’s not that you don't get Arabic.
You don’t get

poetry.
Translated by Keith Payne
Comezaría polo espesor. A súa acidez, o seu ph.

Camiña igual ca unha muller:
entre o masacre do invisible
e o campo de concentración da visibilidade.

Ladra estilo e final,
unha épica hospitalaria.

No poema a linguaxe
faise ouvidos xordos a si mesma,
nel as palabras amplían
o seu círculo de amizades.

Hai que masturbar o abecedario
ata que balbuza cousas
aparentemente inconexas.

Caixa de cambios da fala,
acenos doutra orde.
O sorriso do mosquito dentro da pedra de ámbar.

Non se trata de que non comprendas árabe.
Non entendes

poesía.
LOGOPEDIA / LOGOPEDIA

Let the tea draw till it recalls who we love.
Some nook in a corner of your mouth
must hold the essence of bergamot.

We’re forever being done in
tripping over our tongues
(that ‘s’ of his that feeds
my need to sop him up).
And you’re so palatal, so on the edge…
a likeness buried under your wisdom teeth.

The god of phonology would never have grown
had the meaning not sprayed its sperm
over the howls.

My vocal cords are become straps
for this endless wreckage.
The ‘g’ will ring the little bell of my glottis
like a runaway train we hoped would stop.
And your name
cleaved to my palate,
like communion.

It’s not easy to say earl grey
Bonjour monsieur, I would like an earl grey.

But what I’m after

now that just can’t be said.
Translated by Keith Payne
Deixa que che ferva un té que nos recorde a quen amamos.
Algún pequeno lugar nun recanto da túa mandíbula
ten que poder conseguir ata esencia de bergamota.

Pero de toda a vida nos matan
os problemas de dicción
(ese seu ese que prende
nas miñas ganas de sorberllo).
E ti es tan palatal, tan liminar…
agachando un simulacro debaixo das moas do xuízo.

Nunca habería medrar o deus da fonoloxía
se o significado non espallase
o seu esperma sobre os ouveos.

As miñas cordas vocais vólvense sogas
para esta calamidade que non encontra maneira.
O gue vai tirar entón da campaíña da miña glote
coma un tren desbocado que quixésemos frear.
E o teu nome
pégaseme ao padal,
como que o comungo.

Non é doado pronunciar earl grey.
Bonjour monsieur, quero un earl grey.

Pero o que quero eu

si que é impronunciable.
LISTEN AND REPEAT: un paxaro, unha barba / LISTEN AND REPEAT: un paxaro, unha barba.

The whole sky is hunched. An intransitive thirst.

Talking a foreign language
is like wearing borrowed clothes.

Helga confuses the words for land and landscape
(who would you be in another language?)

You show me
my vocal chord
is at times
off key.

In the back garden of language
It’s the prosody that snags
my dress.

I’ll tell you something about the problems with language:
there are things I just can’t wrap my mouth around.

Like when I see you sat and all I see
is a seat –
ceci n’est pas une chaise.
A camera obscura beams on the hemisphere.

Pronounce: if the poem is an exorcism,
a change of state, some humour
takes shape to escape from us.

That’s phonation, enthalpy.

But yes, you are absolutely right:
my delivery leaves
much to be desired.
(If I’m not watching your teeth
I won’t understand a word you say).

The sky shrinks. Helga smiles in italics.

And I learn the difference between a beard and a bird
– and not just what takes off
when I try to hold it
in my hands.
Translated by Keith Payne
Todo o ceo está en crequenas. Unha sede intransitiva.

Falar nunha lingua allea
parécese a poñer roupa prestada.

Helga confunde os significados de país e paisaxe.
(Que clase de persoa serías noutro idioma?).

Ti, fasme notar que, ás veces,
este meu instrumento de corda
vocal
desafina.

No patio de luces da linguaxe,
engánchame a prosodia
no vestido.

Contareiche algo sobre os meus problemas coa lingua:
hai cousas que non podo pronunciar.

Como cando te vexo sentado e só vexo
unha cadeira –
ceci n’est pas une chaise.
Unha cámara escura proxecta no hemisferio.

Pronunciar: se o poema é
un exorcismo, un cambio de agregación; algún humor
solidifica para abandonarnos.

Así é a fonación, a entalpía.

Pero tes toda a razón:
o meu vocalismo deixa
moito que desexar.

(Se deixo de mirar os teus dentes
non vou entender nada do que fales).

O ceo faise pequeno. Helga sorrí en cursiva.

E eu aprendo a diferenciar entre unha barba e un paxaro
máis alá de que levante o voo
se trato de collela
entre as mans.
STORY OF THE TRANSFORMATION / HISTORIA DA TRANSFORMACIÓN

It began as disorder
hurtful restraint as a kid we were poor and had less than nothing
rickety indigence before I wanting grief
a parable of complexes a syndrome a ghost
(it is as dire to miss as it lament it)
Coral shadow shattering pearls.
It began as a slippery gill whose
passing breath left me destitute
The plainest face in the playground I matter
not a whit and I’ll neither grow nor sow
you've got it or you don't renounce it comply swallow
a maelstrom raven sky of eternal cold judgement
a set westerly a private privation
(a nuns' runt like all the rest
each one a lesbian or anorexic
the letter bet into the blood the hands the head
the conscience the cunt).
I shut my eyes and hoped beyond hope
to become once and for all everything I was.

But beauty corrupts. Beauty corrupts.
Coral shadow squandering pearls.
Day breaks conquering and there's boding in its gullet
You fool! bedevilled with box ticking
and not what they held inside.
It was an idle giddy burst of flowers in winter
The rivers leapt back to themselves in pink waterfalls
butterflies and snails born from my hair
The smile of my breasts fuelled airplanes
Beauty corrupts
Beauty corrupts
My supple belly guided by spring
whelks spilled over my tiny hands
high praise pinched my heart
and I didn’t know what to do with all that light in all that shadow.

They said: "your weapon will be your punishment"
they spat my virtues in my face in this
club we won't have girls with scarlet lips
a vicious tide of filth gaining interest
that has nothing to do with my mascara
the mice burrowed into my room and dirtied the linen drawers
litres of scrap pitch lurking secretly litres
of control litres of mud-slingers kilos of suspicion raised
with just the arc of my eyebrows you should be hog-tied
stained grey and all trace erased with acid
renounce who I am just to write?
they skinned me alive for my long tapering neck
for the hair that springs from the nape in this
club we won't have girls who strut
We do not trust summer
Beauty corrupts.
Make bloody sure it's worth it.
Translated by Keith Payne
Foi primeiro un trastorno
unha lesiva abstinencia de nena eramos pobres e non tiña nin aquilo
raquítica de min depauperada antes de eu amargor carente unha
parábola de complexos unha síndrome unha pantasma
(Aciago a partes iguais botalo en falla ou lamentalo)
Arrecife de sombra que rompe os meus colares.
Foi primeiro unha branquia evasiva que
non me quixo facer feliz tocándome co seu sopro
son a cara máis común do patio do colexio
a faciana eslamiada que nada en nada sementa
telo ou non o tes renuncia afaite traga iso
corvos toldando nubes unha condena de frío eterno
unha paciente galerna unha privada privación
(nena de colexio de monxas que fun saen todas
anoréxicas ou lesbianas a
letra entra con sangue nos cóbados nas cabezas nas
conciencias ou nas conas).
Pechei os ollos e desexei con todas as miñas forzas
lograr dunha vez por todas converterme na que era.

Pero a beleza corrompe. A beleza corrompe.
Arrecife de sombra que gasta os meus colares.
Vence a madrugada e a gorxa contén un presaxio.
Pobre parviña!, obsesionácheste con cubrir con aspas en vez de
co seu contido.
Foi un lento e vertixinoso agromar de flores en inverno
Os ríos saltaban cara atrás e resolvíanse en fervenzas rosas
borboletas e caracois nacéronme nos cabelos
O sorriso dos meus peitos deu combustible aos aeroplanos
A beleza corrompe
A beleza corrompe
A tersura do meu ventre escoltaba á primavera
desbordaron as buguinas nas miñas mans tan miúdas
o meu afago máis alto beliscou o meu ventrículo
e xa non souben qué facer con tanta luz en tanta sombra.

Dixéronme: “a túa propia arma será o teu propio castigo”
cuspíronme na cara as miñas propias virtudes neste
club non admiten a rapazas cos beizos pintados de vermello
un maremoto sucio unha usura de perversión que
non pode ter que ver coa miña máscara de pestanas os
ratos subiron ao meu cuarto enluxaron os caixóns da roupa branca
litros de ferralla alcatrán axexo ás agachadas litros
de control litros de difamadores quilos de suspicacias levantadas
só coa tensión do arco das miñas cellas deberían maniatarte
adxudicarte unha estampa gris e borrarte os trazos con ácido
¿renunciar a ser eu para ser unha escritora?
demonizaron o esguío e lanzal do meu pescozo e o
xeito en que me nace o cabelo na parte baixa da caluga neste
club non admiten a rapazas tan ben adobiadas
Desconfiamos do estío
A beleza corrompe.
Mira ben se che compensa todo isto.