The Gravest Moment of Life

Peruvian poet, short story writer, playwright and journalist Cesar Vallejo was born in the Andean town of Santiago de Chuco in 1892 to a large family of mixed Spanish and native blood. His compassionate and moving depictions of the hardships faced by indigenous people in Peru in stories such as “The Two Soras” have had a huge influence on other writers of social conscience in Latin America. All of his poetry and prose is marked by a melancholic sensibility that has become a hallmark of modern Latin American literature. Vallejo died in Paris (as his poem “Black Stone on a White Stone” prophetically predicted) in 1938.

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Songs

The Mexican poet Martin Agonía was born in 1969 in Ecatepec de Morelos, in the State of Mexico. He has been living in Toronto for 10 years. His past experiences and his experiences as an immigrant have shaped his literary work, which is marked by social critique and a blunt description of the reality of many foreigners living in one of the most developed cities in the world. His writings have been published in the anthology Iguana, escribir el exilio (White Dwarf, 2007) and in his poetry collection La Tolvanera (2012).

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Ignacio Castro

He danced when he felt sad, and he looked without seeing. His life was a feast of helpless feelings, barely perceptible, but certain. There were times when he would cling to vanities and make the air taste humid. He knew how to breathe; how to breathe in life. Thus he wandered, looking for a little money without trying too hard, without ever longing for it.

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Martha Bátiz

The good thing is that nobody gives you dirty looks; I mean, nobody stares at you. It’s considered impolite, and the people in this city are very discreet, regardless of how you look. When somebody gets on the streetcar with a hot dog in hand and the whole carriage starts reeking of onions, nobody objects. When someone gets on who looks like he hasn’t had a bath in three months, the more sensitive people, at most, might change seats… but that’s as far as it goes.

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Antimatter

Hugh Hazelton is a Montreal-based poet and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America, and the work of Latin American writers of Canada. He has written several books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver (Signature, 2005), a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s award for French-English translation in 2006, and his book Latinocanadá: A Critical Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada (McGill-Queen’s, 2007) received the Best Book award from the Canadian Association of Hispanists. “Antimatter” is the title piece from his poetry collection published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003 (the self-translated Spanish version of the collection was published by Split Quotation/La Cita Trunca in 2009), and is republished here with the author’s permission.

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Guillermo Rose

Until the night that my PC froze so unexpectedly, I had never made the connection between Juan’s death and my sudden interest in writing. At that moment I didn’t understand why such a crazy notion would occur to me, more than seven years after he had disappeared from the planet, until I began to feel so easily, powerfully and, above all, suddenly inspired to write.

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Jorge Carrigan

A businessman, prosperous and ambitious, determines that it’s time to get married and establish a family at the very moment that a businesswoman, firm and resolute, who has just founded her own company, decides that it’s time to enter into a marriage agreement.

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