Xaime Martínez

- Spain -

Xaime Martínez (Uviéu, 1993) is a writer, philologist and pop musician. He has written poetry collections in both Spanish and Asturian, such as Hibernia (Saltadera, 2017) or Cuerpos perdidos en las morgues (Ultramarinos, 2018), National Prize of Young Poetry “Miguel Hernández” 2019. He also released two albums together with the folk group La Bande and Ósculos d'agua nel Imperiu Asturianu (Araz, 2018), a solo book-disc. He was co-founder of the young literature magazine Oculta Lit and holds a PhD in Humanistic Research thanks to a thesis about literary fights in the 18th century. La fuercia o les 4 epifaníes de Martín Feito (Hoja de Lata, 2021), his first novel, was translated into Spanish (Malas Tierras, 2023). His work has been translated into languages such as Catalan, Swedish and English.

 

 


The vast array of perspectives offered by Xaime Martínez’s poetry places us before a literary line that is eclectic, mystical, and at times intentionally blurred. His writing is the manifestation of a continuous and voracious literary reflection. In Cuerpos perdidos en las morgues. Una novela de detectives (Lost Bodies in the Morgues. A Detective Novel, Ultramarinos, 2018), one of his most recent works, we find ourselves facing a complex exercise in intertextuality, within a universe that unsettles—precisely what the author intends. Against all that is spoken in vain, this transgressive writing rises up, breaking down, verse by verse, the already-written, aesthetic conventions, and the very notion of the literary itself.

 

Since the deceptive subtitle references a novel, it seems logical to approach the poetry as a barely concealed form of narrative. In this title-subtitle sequence, as editor Unai Velasco points out, “the identity of the poetry collection is immediately undermined when we are told it’s a ‘detective novel,’” drawing from pulp subgenres (from noir to sci-fi, by way of historical fiction). But perhaps one of its greatest accomplishments—very much in tune with Roberto Bolaño—is reclaiming for poetry the narrative possibilities that appear to have been hijacked by the random friends of mass-market realism (“50 kilos of adolescence, 200 grams of Internet”), reorienting them instead toward adventure and imagination, both everyday and dreamlike.

 

Xaime Martínez’s writing constructs an alternate world, seeking to restore an annihilated identity. His poems, laden with playful symbolism, reflect the absorption of all the voices that have shaped the poetic subject: a postmodern archetype that undertakes two overlapping actions—one of constructing a fictional discourse where the I delves into intimacy while attempting to deconstruct itself, and another of sketching a theory of the poet and his craft in this realm of “magnetic dusks.” At its best, the text feels like a joke (“at its worst, an ethical treatise”), a complex refinery of meaning that reveals the hidden face of events and leaves us suddenly shaken, exposing—beneath the absurd—the failure and sacrifice of the subject in a routine where the intimate (dis)order invalidates the external (dis)order.

 

A bold, original, ironic, and critical revision of history and identity—of a crime and the disappearance of the body—investigated by Fatal Destínez (Xaime Martínez), a cold, lost, dual detective à la Arturo Bandini, Nick Belane, or Arturo Belano. Furthermore, as the editor also notes, Xaime Martínez (Fatal Destínez) reclaims the idea of literature as erotic transformation and remedium amoris—as a hybrid lyrical terrain that moves, poem by poem, through an appropriately generic tradition, a literary crossfire, a gesture reminiscent of certain polymorphic postmodern narrative forms. As David Foster Wallace once predicted: “Fiction in gray times doesn’t have to be gray.”

 

 

Author:  Guillermo Sánchez Ungidos. From review Pregúntale al polvo, Destínez. La verdad (?) sobre el caso Cuerpos perdidos en las morgues. Una novela de detectives, de Xaime Martínez (El cuaderno, 2019)

 
More about the poet

Poetry

  1. BODIES LOST IN MORGUES / CUERPOS PERDIDOS EN LAS MORGUES

  2. I WOKE UP AND YOU WERE CRYING / ME DESPERTÉ Y LLORABAS

  3. THE VALLADOLID DEBATE / JUNTA DE VALLADOLID

  4. FATAL DESTÍNEZ’S DATE DIDN’T GO TO PLAN / LA CITA DE FATAL DESTÍNEZ NO SALIÓ COMO ESPERABA

  5. THE SICK THINKERS / LOS PENSADORES ENFERMOS

  6. THE MASK ENQUIRES / LA MÁZCARA ENTRUGA

  7. FIRST SONG OF THE MASK / PRIMER CANTAR DE LA MÁZCARA

  8. XOTA OF THE MASK / XOTA DE LA MÁZCARA