Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Joshua Edwards. FICTICIA was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of "Letters to Robinson," and a "Sky Cycle." While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.
Author City: Mexico City MEX
María Baranda was born in Mexico City in 1962. Among her many prizes are two FONCA "young artist" fellowships in poetry, a FONCA / Rockefeller nonfiction fellowship, the National Efraín Huerta Prize, the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize, the Villa de Madrid Latin American Poetry Prize of Madrid, Spain, and the FILIJ Children's Story Prize. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and eight works of children's literature. Her poems have been translated into English, French, Lithuanian, and German. In the U.S.A., her poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Zoland Poetry, Boston Review, Circumference, Washington Square, and in the anthologies Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico (Sarabande Books) and REVERSIBLE MONUMENTS: CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN POETRY (Copper Canyon Press).
“The most unusual thing about María Baranda's dazzling accomplishment as a poet is that her most recent books are her very best ones. She keeps honing one of the most expressive lyricisms in contemporary Mexican poetry. Her complex prosody—the pitch and tempo rising in plangent cadences that break into sharp, percussive counterpoint—are here, in the poignant, sea-haunted book length poem FICTICIA, at their best. And Joshua Edwards, a supremely gifted poet himself, brings out the full force of Baranda's music.”
—Forrest Gander
“María Baranda is one of the finest poets of her generation, those born in the 1960s, her work demonstrates adherence to the Mexican and Hispano-American tradition—that of the long meditative poem, with sinuous syntax and rich diction—with the not so frequent capacity for conceptual synthesis and precision of imagery and metaphor.”
—José María Espinasa
“María Baranda is today one of our country's necessary poets. During the past twenty years she has been able to start a conversation between recent Mexican lyric poetry and its predecessors: from the great pre-Hispanic poets to the those who in the 1960s changed the course of poetry in Mexico and in Latin America. María Baranda watches and listens. Her poetic speech passes through the senses before becoming language; it is this that gives her verses their spellbinding quality.”
—Eduardo Hurtado