Ruth Llana

- Spain -

Ruth Llana (Pola de Siero, Asturias, 1990) is the author of four poetry collections, including tiembla (Point de Lunettes 2014; Federico García Lorca University of Granada Poetry Prize 2013); the artisanal chapbook estructuras (Ejemplar Único 2015) in collaboration with artist Gabriel Viñals; umbral (Malasangre 2017); and La primavera del saguaro (Ultramarinos 2021). She has translated to Spanish Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry collection I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (Kriller 71, 2019) and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (Ultramarinos, 2022). In collaboration with Jesse Lee Kercheval, she has also translated to English the work of Uruguayan poets Juan Manuel Sánchez and Claudia Magliano, and her own poetry has been translated into both English and Portuguese. Llana’s dynamic writing has appeared in poetry and nonfiction magazines such as Shangrila, El Cuaderno, and Revista Kokoro, among other publications, as well as within cultural supplement columns as a collaborator for La nueva España. In recognition of this distinguished literary trajectory, in 2023, she was awarded the Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Graduate Student Award in the Creative Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received her doctorate in Latin American Literature and Visual Cultures in 2024.

Described as magical, inexhaustible, and spellbinding by scholars and authors such as Munir Hachemi, Llana’s works have been met with critical acclaim since her official poetic debut in 2014. Moving to explore the revolutionary aspects of genre-bending lyricism across her career, her queer coming-of-age poetics as first developed in Tiembla has only continued to conjure the potency behind ritualistic and transgressive acts of writing; while exploring how language both captures and fails to convey the meanings of loss, grief, and mourning, her collective oeuvre moves to challenge, as noted by scholar Pablo López Carballo, the “traditional understandings of the poem.”

Whether exploring language as a performative act, capturing dreamlike dialogues that haunt and hum in memory, or questioning its trustworthiness as she attempts to unravel it, Llana’s work has often served as a vessel for the unsaid, the unmoored, or the forgotten, as analyzed by Marcos Canteli. Materially serving as a threshold where voices gather and linger, her pages, as scholar and author Vicente Luis Mora has noted in reference to La primavera del saguaro, “…don’t sound like something new, they are something new, and are well-constructed, and well-deconstructed—and that, in our landscape, takes on the hues of an event.” In the same vein, López Carballo has also highlighted how Llana’s work is an example of what it means to complicate “…the text-world relationship in the search for meaning,” acting as an inquiry where “there is also a play between life and death, which we could once again understand as a boundary or as a membrane that ultimately brings two parts into contact within the same plane of reality.”

Llana balances her life between Spain and the United States, embodying in her writing a subjectivity rooted in the liminal. Her work explores the nuanced, often ambiguous realms of identity, borderlands, and belonging, drawing from a lineage of writers who have similarly dwelled in the in-between as a source of creative and existential inquiry. As identified by scholars Raúl Molina Gil and Álvaro López Fernández, she follows the path of artists like Agota Kristof, Ana Mendieta, Forugh Farrokhzad, and M. NourbeSe Philip, each of whom grappled with displacement and the complexity of the self in their work. Expanded upon by María Elena Higueruelo in her analysis of Llana’s work, she argues: “Baptized under the sign of the flowering cactus, La primavera del saguaro portrays a subjective journey that begins with uprootedness and self-protection and culminates in an epiphany born of resilience; a journey marked by skepticism toward the artifice of linearity in search of alternatives to conventional poetic forms, ultimately capturing the inherent intermittencies in the rhythms of life.” Culminating in the connection with an anonymous Inuit text, Llana’s exploration in La primavera del saguaro invokes the timeless, collective voice of those who inhabit the edges of (in)definition, merging personal narrative with ancestral memory and reverberating with the poetics of exile and belonging.

Serving as a space where human, nonhuman actors, and matter gather to protest and take up language as unreliable armor, Llana’s creative and critical production continues to reach for the untamable edges of asking language to convey the gravity of what it means to be human, to belong, and to speak.

More about the poet

Poetry

WISH TO BE RIDING BAREBACK / DESEO DE SER ARQUERO
SACRIFICE / EL SACRIFICIO

And if I told you, yes, if I told you that last night I dreamed I was splitting, yes, being split
open not by a pelican, no, but four pelicans that I christened cormorants and that you and
others like me were releasing them into the air and that yes, that was me splitting, my birth,
my resurrection, and that in death one of them turned into egg white and spilled on the
ground and you guys reduced the number yes and you reduced it for me because it was
late, it was late and I’d already given that morsel of my own flesh to death, to the abortion
of my own life, to the silence of your compassion, to the flight of those birds that no, I
didn’t see emerging from my entrails, but you, and others like me, were releasing and they,
they were trying to fly as it were out of me, as if they were on a leash, as if they really
were, as if once they were released, I’d never see them again, and I’d forget them, as I’ll
forget their names, cormorant, and that body, and the morsel of skin and bone I held later in
my arms, not covered in blood any more, not covered in tears, but like a new species, like a
suspended dream, and my admiration at its tiny miracle, the breath smoking from the
diaphragm, the union of all those feathers, the name I wouldn’t pronounce after the
disassociation of my limbs, the devouring of my entrails from which all of them, yes, all of
them, flew out, along with my oblivion, because tomorrow will come and I shan’t have a
child, not even the initial of a name, but I’ll find myself in a meadow, I’ll find the grass,
and a thin thread will still link me to that absence, to the yolk that will drip from my
fingers, and then I’ll say it’s impossible; that cord coming out of my belly button, yes, will
spend my years dangling there, and I’ll say, yes, I’ll say it was beating.
Translated by Catherine Jagoe
Y si yo te dijera, sí, si yo te dijera que anoche soñé que partía sí, que me partía a la mitad
no un pelícano, no, sino cuatro pelícanos a los que bauticé con el nombre de cormorán y
ue tú y otros tantos como yo los soltabais en el aire y que en eso sí, en eso consistía mi
partida, mi parto, mi resurrección, y que en la muerte uno de ellos se transformó en clara y
se esparció por el suelo y redujisteis el número sí y lo redujisteis para mí porque ya era
tarde, ya era tarde y ya había dado ese trozo de mi carne a la muerte, al aborto de mi propia
vida, al silencio de vuestra compasión, al vuelo de esos pájaros que no, no vi salir de mis
entrañas, sino que tú, y otros tantos como yo, los soltabais y ellos, ellos intentaban volar
como desde mí, como si estuvieran atados, como si de verdad lo estuvieran y jamás, una
vez se soltaran, volvería a verlos, y los olvidaría, como olvidaré sus nombres, cormorán, y
este cuerpo, y el trozo de piel y huesos que sujeté más tarde entre mis brazos, ya no
sanguinolento, ya no cubierto de lágrimas, sino como una especie nueva, como un sueño
suspendido, y mi admiración por su pequeño milagro, la respiración humeante desde el
diafragma, la unión de todas esas plumas, el nombre que ya no pronunciaría después de la
disociación de mis miembros, el devorar mis vísceras de donde, sí, ellos, todos ellos,
salieron volando, y salieron junto a mi olvido, porque llegará mañana y no tendré un niño,
ni siquiera la inicial de un nombre, sino que me encontraré en un prado, encontraré la
hierba, y un fino hilo que me seguirá uniendo a esa ausencia, a la yema que colgará de mis
dedos, y entonces diré lo que es imposible; ese cordón desde mi ombligo, sí, cumplirá mis
años ahí colgado, y diré, sí, diré que estaba latiendo.
CEREMONY / CEREMONIA

As I was saying, I dreamed again, I dreamed again, last night, that we were getting married, that you were a woman, that I was wearing white, with my hair pulled back in a little-girl bun, that at the moment of communion, as I was saying, you were a woman. It was a stone church, up in the mountains, but I never saw the grass, I say, I came back from the dream without having seen the grass. And I don’t remember the kiss, no, I don’t remember the moment of union, I only remember the stone, the faces of the guests because we were too young and suddenly you were a woman and perhaps we wouldn’t be allowed to get married but I was dressed in white to write our names on another white paper white unlike my skin under that bridal gown and yours that reminded me you loved me with that presence of yours, transformed, and I don’t remember, I only remember the moment of writing your name and mine side by side, not one on top of the other, no, but side by side, the way they should be for balance, under the gaze of the parish priest, under the wooden beams, and the gray stone walls, and a brown door I didn’t open, but I asked what was on the other side, and who knows, only, I didn’t see the grass; I say, I married you dressed in white, suddenly a woman, in the mountains, and I never saw the grass, I never saw the grass even for a second, only the lowering sky with the faded light of autumn clouds, and my body, childlike almost, getting married in white, white in three places, or four places, with a body, with her who claimed to be you; and I wrote your name next to mine, and in some way you were joined to me, not by a string, a rope, an umbilicus, or a word, but maybe by the lowering sky, the church, knowing your name, knowing the beams in my mouth, knowing the cold of the wall in my eyes, yes, knowing you and not needing, no, not needing anything more than to be side by side, just our names side by side, just the way they are and I see them, sideline versions of ourselves.
Translated by Catherine Jagoe
He vuelto a soñar, he vuelto a soñar, anoche, que te decía, que nos casábamos, que eras una mujer, que yo iba de blanco, con el cabello recogido en un moño infantil, que en el momento de la comunión, te decía, eras una mujer. La iglesia era de piedra, en medio del monte, pero no vi la hierba, te digo, regresé del sueño sin ver la hierba. Y no recuerdo el beso, no, no recuerdo el momento de unión, no recuerdo más que la piedra, las cara de los invitados porque éramos demasiado jóvenes y de repente tú una mujer y quizás no podríamos casarnos porque me vestí de blanco para escribir nuestros nombres en otro papel blanco blanco como no lo era mi piel debajo de ese vestido de novia y la tuya que me lo recordaba que me querías con esa presencia tuya, transformada, y no recuerdo, no recuerdo más que el momento de escribir tu nombre y el mío al lado, no uno encima del otro, no, sino una al lado del otro, como debía ser para mantener el equilibrio, bajo la mirada del párroco, bajo las vigas de madera, y las paredes de piedra gris, y una puerta marrón que no abrí, pero pregunté por el otro lado, y quién sabe, sólo, si no vi la hierba; te digo, me casé de blanco contigo, una mujer de repente, en el monte, y no vi la hierba, no vi la hierba ni un instante, sólo el cielo cubierto por la luz marchita de las nubes de otoño, y mi cuerpo infantil, casi, casándose en blanco, en tres lugares blanco, o cuatro lugares, con un cuerpo, con aquella que pretendía ser aquello de ti; y escribí tu nombre al lado del mío, y estuviste de alguna manera, unido a mí, no por un cordón, una cuerda, un ombligo, o una palara, sino puede que por el cielo encapotado, la iglesia, saber tu nombre, saber las vigas en mi boca, saber el frío de la pared en mis ojos, sí, saberte a ti y no necesitar, no necesitarlo, no, no más que esa posición, no más que esa posición de nuestros nombres, no más que ver el modo en que lo son y los veo, laterales de nosotros mismos.
BOTANICAL BELONGING / PERTENENCIA BOTÁNICA

Ruth Llana

- Spain -

Poetry

WISH TO BE RIDING BAREBACK / DESEO DE SER ARQUERO

SACRIFICE / EL SACRIFICIO

CEREMONY / CEREMONIA

BOTANICAL BELONGING / PERTENENCIA BOTÁNICA