Berta García Faet

- Spain -

Berta García Faet (Valencia, Spain, 1988) is a poet and the recipient of numerous literary prizes. She is the author of the essay El arte de encender las palabras (Barlin, 2023). She has published eight books of poetry: Corazonada (La Bella Varsovia, 2023), Prize TodosTusLibros Best Book of Poetry 2023; Una pequeña personalidad linda (La Bella Varsovia, 2021); Los salmos fosforitos (La Bella Varsovia, 2017), National Prize Young Poetry “Miguel Hernández” 2018; La edad de merecer (La Bella Varsovia, 2015), translated to English by Kelsi Vanada as The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018); and four other books, republished in Corazón tradicionalista: Poesía 2008-2011 (La Bella Varsovia, 2017). As a literary translator, she has translated works by Rachel Zucker, Caren Beilin, Paul Legault, and Blanca Llum Vidal, among others. She obtained her PhD in Hispanic Studies at Brown University in 2021.

 


 


A couple of years ago, La edad de merecer fell into my hands purely by accident, and it took me a couple of hours to close my mouth again. I still believe it’s a powerful book—one that time will eventually include in the canon—a book charged with love, energy, and eloquence in an age of posturing and incoherence, and above all, a book of brutal exposure.

 

True poetry is measured by precision. But precision is sometimes a double-edged sword. Precise poets are bone-poets—combative, often not very likable, though almost always wise. Wordy poets tend to be more charming, more full of life—but also more deceitful. They have a diabolical flaw: it’s hard for them to let go of a beautiful line just because it happens to be untrue. García Faet is, in that sense, a kind of squaring of the circle: she has a natural verbosity, at times almost narrative, but it’s impossible not to feel that the “poetic” drive pushing her to put her experience into black and white comes from a deeper commitment to truth than to “literature.” I also think that’s a rather extraordinary trait—rarer than spotting an Iberian lynx in heat—and one she shares with other world-class companions-in-arms like Sharon Olds or Anne Carson, to name just two poets who remind me of her in different ways.

 

This book brings together García Faet’s first four collections: Manojo de abominaciones (2008), Night club para alumnas aplicadas (2009), Introducción a todo (2011), and Fresa y herida (2011). The latter two are of notably higher quality than the first ones. The first book, above all, has documentary value, like a “lion cub,” giving us a glimpse of the early lines of someone who would go on to become a fantastic poet. But starting with the second book, one can already find poems of full-blown talent. The moments where she slips into more obvious or predictable territory seem to coincide—at least to me—with periods of personal construction, when the author perhaps wasn’t quite sure what kind of woman she wanted to become, or was dancing—as she describes in her prologue—between an “alternative and systematic self-fashioning as femme fatale and romantic heroine.” But that’s certainly forgivable, considering the age at which some of these poems were written. In any case, this Corazón tradicionalista, like all of García Faet’s poetry, is here to stay.

 

García Faet’s great theme is being in love—and all its peripheries: falling out of love, self-awareness in the theater of seduction, the logic and unlogic of encounter, carnivorous sex, the discovery of self through nostalgia for the beloved… But what makes her approach to this theme—older than the letter A—so memorable is not only a rich variety of rhetorical resources in the service of a natural tone (nothing is more artificial than seeming simple), but also—again—her personal exposure, her “honesty” (ah, that tricky word). García Faet is not honest (like so many of her literary peers) because she reveals horrible truths about herself—she doesn’t—but because she writes from a place of sharp insight and yet an anti-ironic perspective. Again, the Iberian lynx. It took me a while to realize that this was her rarest trait, but once I did, all her poetry seemed lit from within—like that childhood moment when we first realized our mother was beautiful and our uncle Federico an Olympic-grade bore. In Spain, intelligence is often confused with irony—a mistake that culturally turns us into a narrow-minded, self-absorbed country that applauds the slap in the face and mistakes open vulnerability for cowardice. García Faet’s poems are the opposite of that attitude: extroverted, incisive, anti-ironic, direct—the closest thing—pardon the Argentinism—to good therapy. May she stay with us for many years to come.

 


 

Author: Andrés Barba. Review Corazón tradicionalista, de Berta García Faet (Zenda, 2019)