Burn the Losses

Antonio Gamoneda

Shaped by a childhood during the Spanish Civil War and a youth under the censorious Franco dictatorship, Antonio Gamoneda's poetry chronicles both memory and oblivion with an intensity and strangeness that pushes back against all oppressive forces that seek to flatten and reduce our experiences, our language. Burn the Losses oscillates between purity and filth, hope and darkness, the past and a vibrating lyrical present, refusing simple answers. Instead, Gamoneda enlists the reader in Poetry's deathless cause: “burn in me the meanings.” “Close my eyes / and burn the limits.”