Trace (Bridges)

IN THIS COLLECTION OF POEMS, the reader will find the watermarks of a real, imaginary and fantastic city that beats beneath the sidewalks, in the sun, in the wind that knocks the trees down, in the reflection of the light in the puddles after the rain.

Iliana Rodríguez knows how to delineate with words the solicitations, the elusive messages that draws in the streets the night “of long avenues / as expectations”; the trees, whose “mineral blood drags / the dark secrets”; the wind, which destroys and transforms; and even the inhabitants of the city, who turn into figures in her poems, into ink signs of a dance sometimes luminous and sometimes dark: “Maybe you’re a shadow. / A pencil stroke / blotted out by the winds.”

The poet writes: “I would like to decipher / the ideogram of my palm: / the sign that defines. / Then I watch my hand / tracing / these words / with its brush.” Her hand thus becomes a brush, and her fingers form a drawing in the poems of Trace in which we recognize ourselves.

Iliana Rodríguez, a growing voice in the poetry of Mexico, makes the signs of the city and the world turn around in her threshold of water and light, in these poems.