At Peace

Amado Ruiz de Nervo y Ordaz is, without doubt, one of the most outstanding poets of the Mexican literary canon. Born in Tepic, Nayarit in 1870, he moved to Mexico City in 1894, where he soon became a prominent journalist and published his first works. In 1900 he travelled to Paris, and later worked for the Mexican government as a diplomat in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. A consummate novelist and essayist, Nervo is nevertheless best remembered for his poetry, whose delicate combination of mysticism and melancholy makes him perhaps one of the most emblematic ambassadors of the Mexican soul.

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Behold your back

Omar Alberto Santos Balán is a Mexican poet and short story writer based in Campeche. Awards he has received for his work include the “Ignacio Manuel Altamirano” National Prize in December 2006, the Bonaventuriano Poetry and Short Story Prize in Colombia in 2008, and the Edmundo Valadés Latin American Short Story Prize in 2008. He has published 3 collections of his poetry, and his work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. For more information and to see more of his work (in the original Spanish), visit the website “Poetas del Mundo“.

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To Roosevelt

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, often cited as one of the most important precursors of 20th century Latin American literature, wrote this poem in 1905. An open letter to the U.S. president of the time, the poem is almost prophetic in its description of the interventionist approach that successive U.S. governments would take in Latin America in the century that followed, and also presents a mythologized portrait of Latin America that would inform the ideology of many of the continent’s anti-imperialist revolutions. In many respects, the poem is as relevant today in its presentation of U.S.-Latin American relations as it was when it was written 105 years ago.

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A Friendly Invitation

Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938): poet, professor, journalist and one of the most representative figures of the Latin American post-modernist movement. Born in Lugano (the Italian part of Switzerland) to Argentine parents, she grew up mostly in Rosario, Argentina, and moved to Buenos Aires at the age of 19. She published her first collection of poems, La Inquietud del Rosal in 1916, and by the 1920s she had become one of Argentina’s most prominent poets, renowned for her amorous and often erotic verse. A recurring theme of her poetry is male oppression of women, for which she would later become an icon for the feminist movement throughout Latin America. In 1937, on learning that she had breast cancer, Storni drowned herself in the sea off Mar del Plata. Her often romanticized death was immortalized in the song “Alfonsina y el Mar”, which has been recorded by Mercedes Sosa and Nana Mouskouri, among others.

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Ghost Novel

Krystell Guevara Barrales was born in Puebla, Mexico, where she completed her secondary studies at El Colegio Americano. In 2003, she won first place in the Jaime Sabines poetry contest at Colegio Americano. In the same year, she obtained first place in the Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Shorty Story Competition at the same institution. In 2004, she took both first and second place in the same contests. After initiating her university studies in Hispano-American Literature at the University of the Américas Puebla, she transferred to McGill University in Montreal in 2006, in the Hispanic Studies program, and in 2007 she moved to York University in Toronto, where she is currently studying.

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Yólotl Cruz Mendoza

The affirmation made by José Emilio Pacheco in his Antología del modernismo(1) is true with regard to the work of Amado Nervo: the decade of the fifties was a low period for the writer. This translated into a general lack of critical interest in appreciating the diversity of his work, as demonstrated by his Obras completas (“Complete Works”, 1952) published by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Francisco González Guerrero with the Aguilar publishing house of Madrid. The greatest defect, according to the critics, was that as Nervo was popular with the general public, his writing lacked literary value. Popular taste and literary quality could not go hand in hand. This discrediting of his work had its beginnings around 1928, with the Antología de literatura mexicana moderna edited by Jorge Cuesta, a definitive collection for the Mexican literary canon in the 20th century.

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Path

Margarita Feliciano is a poet, critic and literary translator of Italian-Argentine origin who has lived in Canada since 1969. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications throughout Europe and North America. She is professor in Hispanic Studies at Glendon College (York University) in Toronto, and General Director of CCIE (Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español), an organization dedicated to the promotion of the Spanish language in Canada. In 2005, she founded ANTARES, Canada‘s first publishing house dedicated to the publication of literary works in Spanish.

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Distant Songs

The poet Teresa León was born in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso in 1940. She migrated to Canada in 1975, and has lived in Toronto since 1983. After years of writing poetry, her new form of artistic expression is painting and drawing. She is also the proud mother of seven and grandmother of fifteen, and a founding member of Creando Puentes, an organization dedicated to promoting the interests of Hispanic women in Toronto. The above poem originally appeared in her published collection, Poesía Errante, and appears here with the permission of her daughter Irma Paredes.

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I Have a Dead Friend

As a politician, journalist and the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892, José Martí stands among the most revered figures in Latin American political history. As a poet, he left us some of the most moving, melancholy and intimate works in the Hispanic American literary canon.

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Complaining of her Lot

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz lived in Mexico City during the Baroque period of New Spain. Although a devout Catholic nun, many of her poems express her frustration with church expectations that confused artistic expression and the pursuit of beauty with materialistic egotism.

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