Zonadenoticias Blog, July 2007. (Lima, Peru)

This Wednesday, July 18, at 8 p.m. at the Cinematógrafo, Mario Montalbetti, José Carlos Yrigoyen, and Sergio Parra (owner of Metales Pesados bookstore in Santiago de Chile) present Indicios del naufragio (Album del Universo Baketrial), the first book of literature by José Luis Falconi (Lima). The publishing company has shared some details about the author (and I include one more: Falconi, together with ADUB editor Arturo Higa, among others, in the early 90s used to publish the PUCP poetry magazine Vanaguardia, a name that also pertained to the literary group they belonged to). “He studied Literature at the Universidad Católica till 1995 when he emigrated to the United States. Since 2000 he has been in the post of Curator at the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University, where he is also pursuing his doctorate in Romantic Literature. He has contributed both writing and images to several publications in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Together with Gabriela Rangel he has recently edited the volume A Principality of One’s Own, a critical history of the emergence of Latin American art in New York and in the context of the United States; as well as The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States, together with José Antonio Mazzotti, research containing a set of essays about South American immigration to the United States and its complicated relationship to more traditional migratory groups (Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans). He lives in Boston.”

I have asked Falconi for a few lines about his book of poems, which I include here: “Indicios del naufragio is a book that is actually a diptych; the first part includes another book of poems called The Scattered Shelter, in English, which I hope will be published next year in the U.S. They’re both independent but complementary, forming a unit of meaning despite their linguistic differences. This volume, in particular, was made over ten years, since 1006, when I left Peru to get my bachelor’s degree in the U.S. That’s why I consider it not ‘a travel book’ but ‘a book of travels,’ made up of fragments, snippets, shots, all the many that I took due to my work as a curator and photographer, throughout these ten years. There’s a story, tenuous but distinguishable, that emerges throughout the course of these poems. I say ‘course’ because that’s what I hope happens: that one poem leads to the next. Beyond the sailing reference, I hope the sense of journey and failure makes itself felt. That’s the characteristic of this book of poems as a whole that was hardest to achieve. That each poem functions on its own and also fits organically within the volume was something that the editors (Arturo Higa and José Carlos Yrigoyen) helped me to achieve.

 Finally, I include a poem by Falconi from the 1995 anthology La inclinación de los planetas: Seven Peruvian Poets in Boston. A meditative poetry, with long lines that reveal a reflective and also asphyxiating impetus, Falconi, however, according to his critics, is a discrete poet. His activism in the group Vanaguardia situates him in the 90s. A hidden voice that appears in 2000 to nourish the panorama of Peruvian poetry in an interesting way.

Read the article [In Spanish]