Air Hospital
Documentary poetry that reflects on memory, history and the limits of language.
In the line of books like Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, Wallace Stevens’ Notes for a Supreme Fiction, William Carlos Williams’ Patterson, or Raúl Zurita’s Zurita, Hospital del aire adds to the tradition of poetry books that transcend the conventional barriers of genres and propose to re-signify registers that seem irreconcilable.
An amazing book that I really liked and enjoyed.
CANDAYA, 2022, 224 p. DOCUMENTARY POETRY, spanish
Hospital del aire is a poetic fiction about a real event: the tragic plane crash that occurred in Madrid on 27 November 1983. That event had a decisive impact on the future of Latin American literature. Among the passengers was a large group of writers and artists from the continent who, from their various European exiles, were travelling to Colombia to attend the I Encuentro Hispanoamericano de Cultura. It was an event of enormous importance, as it sought to reconnect the literatures of there and here, as well as to promote, after the Transition, an intellectual dialogue between Spanish artists divided by the Franco dictatorship. Among the deceased were authors of the stature of Manuel Scorza, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Marta Traba, Ángel Rama, as well as other figures from the world of music and painting.
Through lyrical reportage, fused with a journalistic collage and a writing diary, we witness the invention of characters who inhabited those dramatic moments. A book that reflects on memory, history, the very limits of language and literature itself. A documentary poetry that reads like a novel, but without losing its evocative capacity to strain the word.
As Diego Sánchez Aguilar says in the prologue: “Hospital del aire is a black box”, that is, the writing that comes after the disaster, a need to find answers or to formulate more precise questions that can guide us towards other ways of experiencing events. That is what this book is looking for: the language we construct to talk about loss.”
Original Title
Hospital del aire
English sample available, by Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Territory of representation
World Wide
More about the rights available for this book
sophiesavary@sosavbooks.com
