Description
The first English-language collection of one of Spain’s most exciting emerging authors performs and interrogates the desires and disillusionments of millennial culture.
García Sierra, one of the central figures of the Spanish young literature movement, constructs bold, strange, uncomfortable poems from everyday life, touching on mental illness, drugs, and heartbreak. His work is widely published (in New Wave Vomit, Ciudades Esqueleto, Playground, and Revista tn, among others) and his first novel, Facendera (Editorial Anagrama, 2022), has brought him broad critical acclaim in Spain. HOUSTON, I’M THE PROBLEM, a selection from his first poetry collection topped off with more recent poems, is the first of his books to appear in English translation.
Poetry.
“In HOUSTON, I’M THE PROBLEM, the long line is made new again in all its inertia and obsession. Óscar García Sierra's recursive poems hoard and catalog the anxieties of language and living, revealing the ways in which outside forces 'self' us. They are searching systems, sending out dispatches in an atmosphere of desire and disappointment under capitalism. I was thrilled to be reunited with such endangered phrases as 'I feel like,' 'I feel as if,' 'I hope,' 'I wish,' 'I want,' and 'I think' in this collection. Medicated, anaphoric, depressed, dryly humorous, and insistent, these pop-nihilist poems are so full, you can’t help but think of them as beautiful holes dragging themselves through the wreckage of the page. I feel as though I’ve been hooked up to an IV of something I didn’t know I was lacking.”
—Emily Skillings
“The achievement of HOUSTON, I’M THE PROBLEM, resides in García’s creation of a poetic universe of his own, which rises up to claim a new creative path where the borders between the arts start to shake.”
—Laura Villar, Compostimes
Author Bio
Óscar García Sierra was born in León, Spain, in 1994. He studied literature at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and published his first book, Houston, yo soy el problema (Espasa), in 2016. His work has appeared in the alt/lit journal New Wave Vomit, the Tumblr Ciudades Esqueleto, the news and media website Playground, and the poetry magazine Revista tn, among others. His novel, Facendera, was published to wide acclaim by Editorial Anagrama in 2022.
Author City: MADRID SPA
Carmen Yus Quintero was born in Huelva, Spain in 1996. She is a Spanish and English teacher and translator. She has a bachelor's degree in Translation and Interpreting, an MA in Spanish Studies, and an MA in Education. Her translations of Óscar García's work have appeared online in New Poetry in Translation (now World Poetry Review). An essay, "Posibilidades de la virtualidad" (The Possibilities of Virtual Theater) appears in Falso Mutis.
Author City: HUELVA SPA