The poet Melisa Arzate Amaro spoke with SinEmbargo about her work Blood flickersa collection of poems that exposes the violent reality that “touches us, hurts us, tarnishes us, injures us, not only in the country, and not only as a woman, but as citizens of the world, the citizens of a world that is at war.”
Mexico City, September 5 (SinEmbargo).– In Blood flickers (Peripheral Editions), the poet Melissa Arzate Amaro compiles a set of poems “that broadly have to do with a question, a lament, a cry, for a reality that affects us at this moment” and that at the same time, shares, meditates on language.
“The whole world is affected by wars as old as the one that is currently taking place in the Gaza Strip, where there have been so many conflicts historically, the war in Ukraine, conflicts in so many places as well, for example, in Latin America, in the Middle East that have not been resolved and that concerns us all and hurts us all, regardless of the latitude in which we are,” Arzate Amaro commented in an interview. “The other great axis to which Titila sangre is circumscribed has to do with language and from the beginning this is announced with the title of the collection itself.”
The author expressed that she is personally interested in the word flicker, which “has to do with latency, with an astral thing of an asteroid, a star, that turns on and off, turns on and off.”
“I remember that when I was a child my mother and my grandmother told me that the way to tell a star from a planet was because the stars twinkled, and I loved it, it seemed very sweet to me at the time. Now I pair it and make it dance with the word blood to turn it into something truly dual, into something dichotomous, let’s say, where I write about violence and meditate on language.”
In Titila sangre (Ediciones Peripherales), the poet Melisa Arzate Amaro compiles a set of poems “that broadly have to do with a question, a lament, a cry, for a reality that affects us at this moment.”
Melisa Arzate Amaro said that there is a very clear insistence throughout the collection of poems on asking about the origin of words, such as when she uses the verbs “surf” and “dive” and investigates their origin, but above all also their popular use.
“Many of these words have gradually left our language, they have been replaced by others, but they remain as cognates there that are part of an understanding of the world that is also changing, that is, as our language changes, so does our understanding of the world, and I am very interested in thinking about that,” he added.
Arzate described her “absolute fascination” with language and how words do more than just serve as a vehicle. “I myself am enthralled by that language, I enjoy it deeply, I ride it and I walk in that preciousness of words, I am a language lover. There is a preciousness there that I realize is probably a writing that is not like many writings at this time because it has that enthralledness with the word that perhaps many in poetry from the 70s onwards tried to make minimal or clean up poetry and take it to minimalism. I go the other way, I am filling everything with figures, words and more letters because I want that, I want to enjoy language.”
Obed Rosas
He holds a degree in Communication and Journalism from the FES Aragón of the UNAM. He also studied Hispanic Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.
