Mineral Fire

Mineral Fire is a reflection on time and the poet's melting into it to embrace the individual and the universal, the everyday that is substance between past and present. Her poems plunge a dagger into us where it hurts the most: what we have done for the dignity of humankind, that of others, our own, with our name that carries our own identity inscribed in it? "What if you are nobody?" "And what if no one is each one of us?"

María Ángeles Pérez López is animal and mineral. She falls from the sky and rises from the earth. She glows in the night and basks in the sun. She is "an instant of presence, meteor that rushes to end up colliding with the invisible line of the atmosphere, naked lizard surrounded by cement." At one point in her dazzling Mineral Fire, she declares that "I haven't forgotten that I was kissing you so I could disappear in your belly." You will not forget her kiss, and she will stay on in your belly.

Mineral Fire is a stunning perceptual experiment, an attempt to apprehend simultaneously the tempos of the human body and cycles of geologic time, an exploration of how these scales belong to one another. This collection is filled with collaborations with the living and the dead, with the Earth itself. They are prose poems with incredible dynamic range, gravity and light, fever and science, conducting a migration of language that bears witness to the imagination as it moves. Of course, a work that contemplates the continents of the Earth and the specificities of the bodyas-continent should travel latitudes. What an exciting literary contribution to have the first ever translation of María Ángeles Pérez López's poems into English.