Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translated by Con Cellini. Venezuela is a country in crisis. The economic crisis has produced hyperinflation and prices have risen by more than 6,000%. Millions of citizens do not have access to basic health care and adequate nutrition. Police practices are brutal. With all this happening simultaneously, it's no surprise that more than 5.5 million citizens have left Venezuela, the largest mass migration in recent Latin American history. In Venezuela, citizens sometimes die at home because there is no fuel for ambulances. Rolling blackouts leave citizens without electricity for many hours at a time and when the power returns, the surge of electricity sometimes damages appliances. Venezuela rarely publishes books because there is scarce paper to print them on.
This is the world of poet Ricardo Jesús Mejías Hernández. The poet, however, has taken all the events of daily life and elevated them, has transformed them into poetry. These poems of the struggles of everyday life in Venezuela have risen above the everyday and ultimately won the National Literary Competition IPASME in 2015. LIBRO DE PERCANCES/BOOK OF MISHAPS appears here for the first time in English. In the short poems in the collection, the poet longs for a place of refuge. But he does not die. He does not go into exile. He finds his escape in these poems. Power outages or not, despite whatever inflation surrounds him, he always finds his solace in poetry.
Author Bio
Ricardo Jesús Mejías Hernández is a poet and short story writer from Venezuela. He is a public accountant who graduated from the Universidad de Carabobo. He has published the poetry collections Poemas del oficio y otros vuelos (Sur Editores, 2013), Iluminado en la sombra1 (Negro Sobre Blanco, 2014), El Vocerío de los locos (Negro Sobre Blanco, 2015), Libro de Percances (Fondo Editorial Ipasme, 2015), as well as the book of micro-fiction Cirque (Negro Sobre Blanco, 2014). He is the winner of the Premio Nacional de Poesía Delia Rengifo (Caracas, 2011), of the II Concurso Mundial de Ecopoesía 2012 (Tumbes, Perú) and of the Premio Nacional de Literatura Ipasme in the category of poetry (Caracas, 2015). In addition he won second place in poetry in the III Concurso Por una Venezuela Literaria (2013) and special mention in micro- fiction in the IV Concurso Por una Venezuela Literaria (2014). His poems and stories appear in numerous anthologies in Venezuela and internationally and have been published in the cultural supplements Poemas Contenido del diario El Periodiquito (Maracay), on the site Las Voces del Silencio and in the journal Astrolabium from Argentina.
Author City: MARACAY VEN