Pip: osoparavos.com arrives this week with what amounts to a full literary season compressed into a single post — poetry in Spanish, autobiography, eros, insomnia, and a man walking his blood clot around the block at dawn.
Mara: All of it from Adam Donaldson Powell. The episode moves through Spanish-language poems that cover surrender, desire, identity, and the long arc of a life spent writing — from a sixteen-year-old's romanticized lies to a poet in his seventies who says the work is no longer something he does, but who he is.
Pip: Let's start with the poems themselves.
New poems in Spanish
Mara: The post opens with four haiku under the title "Rendirse" — surrendering to love, to the self, to life, to death. They move from intimacy outward to the cosmic, and the fourth lands here: "Con la última ola / hasta el faro se inclina / hacia el amanecer."
Pip: A lighthouse bowing to the dawn at the moment of death. That image does a lot of work in seventeen syllables.
Mara: The longer poem "Tenemos sólamente este momento" develops that same urgency into something more explicitly erotic and relational — "Un momento sin comienzo o final. Una eternidad." The moment is not a consolation; it is the whole argument.
Pip: And then the post pivots completely. "A medida que pasaron los años" is the autobiographical spine of the whole collection — a first-person account of a writing life moving decade by decade through trauma, sexuality, geography, and language.
Mara: It tracks a shift that matters: poetry beginning as escape and gradually becoming identity. The poem states it directly — "Mi poesía es ahora quien soy. Y mi brillantez es mi honestidad."
Pip: Which reframes everything else in the post. The erotic poems, the political ones, the haiku — they're not separate modes. They're all the same honesty at different temperatures.
Mara: "carta erótica" and the "el tantra de rodo" sequences push into explicit desire without apology, while "MIENTRAS ESPERAMOS" turns political — "AMÉRICA, NO TE RECONOZCO" — and the sequence that follows, including "BOLERO MODERNO" and "ALEGRÍA," uses accumulation and repetition to build pressure rather than argument.
Pip: "VERDE" is just a list — apples, pears, olives, celery, dollar signs, envy — and somehow that's enough.
Mara: "Vals Renco" brings a different texture: a limping waltz, three-legged, going nowhere, with the line "Todo intento de romper el vidrio / es tan vano como gritar dormido." The image of futility is precise without being bleak.
Pip: "una apología de la identidad" is the longest and most structurally ambitious piece — a self-interrogating monologue about desire, control, and the hunger for what resists being known.
Mara: It names its own pattern with uncomfortable clarity: "He convertido lobos en mascotas, y luego me he preguntado por qué no mordían." The speaker understands the mechanism and cannot stop it.
Pip: PARLAR BRUT shifts into Catalan — a cruising-bar scene rendered as a dance of feigned indifference. "El Bufé de las Palabras" goes comic, treating vocabulary as a deli counter where some words cost a dollar and some cost fifty, and the forbidden ones are kept under cloth in the corner.
Mara: "Epitafio" closes the collection's emotional arc. It asks to be measured not in published titles or public noise but in "el calor que mantuve vivo / entre yo y otro." The final lines: "que aprendí, imperfectamente, / a amar — y fui, por un momento, / amado de vuelta."
Pip: Then there's "caminar el coágulo de sangre" — a man walking his blood clot through a Nordic city three times a day because surgeons said they couldn't remove it, and he found that poetry works better than alcohol for managing the pain.
Mara: "Sueño / Vigilia" is a five-part sequence moving through insomnia, narcoleptic erasure, mental siege, a Jungian night crossing, and the careful return to calm. And "Estar aquí ahora" closes the collection with a quiet declaration: "el cielo interior que ninguna enfermedad puede encarcelar."
Pip: "¿Qué tal, preciosa?" and "Adáptate" round out the post — one a tender letter in verse, the other a ten-line address to Don Quixote reminding him that windmills keep turning and sanity is relative. Which, as final words go, is not bad advice for any of us.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that writing is not separate from living — it's the form survival takes when other forms stop working.
Pip: A blood clot on a leash, a lighthouse bowing at dawn, a buffet of words you pay for in consequences. Next time, more from the same address.
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