Asamblea : Poesía reunida 1975-2025

Assembly: Collected Poems 1975-2025 brings together in a single volume all the poetry of writer and visual artist Juan Carlos Mestre (Villafranca del Bierzo, 1957). Gifted with an astonishing verbal imagination, Mestre has built over half a century a rich and compelling body of work, marked simultaneously by wonder and critical ferocity, aesthetic rigor and indignant solidarity with the dispossessed of the world. The "assembly" of the title is that of the living and the dead who have never had a voice, all gathered in the space of the poem, summoned by the word to speak their truth. This volume includes all of the poet's books published to date, plus an excerpt from his new book, The Convertible Cypress, and the first Spanish translation of his book in Galician, 200 Grams of Sad Potatoes. With the perspective afforded by more than half a century of commitment to language, Mestre has undertaken a process of scrutiny and reorganization that offers the definitive version of each title. The book concludes with an appendix of "Early Poetry" that integrates the two series of poems written in the decade preceding the publication of Antiphon of Autumn in the Bierzo Valley (1986). The result, a testament to exceptional talent and a sustained fidelity to the imperatives of the imagination, is already a landmark work of contemporary Spanish poetry.