Suma de fracturas, graduate student Ulises Alaniz's first book of poetry, was published by Valparaíso Ediciones.
"In Suma de fracturas, memory functions as a vessel saturated with pain, a body that relentlessly exhibits the fragments of a nation, making the poem inhabit the extremes of violence," poet León Salvatierra wrote. "Ulises Alaniz uses the metaphor of public transportation to imagine an underworld where corpses burst into the speaker’s room and pile themselves onto his body, crushing him, breaking his ribs, and overwhelming him with their stench of death."
Alaniz is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and a poet from Nicaragua.
Salvatierra continued: "In this book, remembering does not mean commemorating war heroes, but listening to the cries of the murdered, the disappeared, and those bodies that died without anyone ever speaking their names. Many of these texts evoke a state of extreme wakefulness in which the speaker cannot sleep because the dead continue to demand a place within his consciousness. This spectral dimension runs throughout the book: the dead speak, return, accumulate, and observe. But more than fantastic imagery, it is about an ethics of memory. Nicaragua emerges, then, not only as a fractured nation, but as a closed bedroom where the poet listens, night after night, to history amid the creaking of bones."
Valparaíso is an international independent literary publishing house that specializes in poetry. It publishes Spanish-language poets for readers in the Americas and Spain while also bringing major U.S. poets into Spanish through bilingual editions. They have published work from Rita Dove, Dereck Walcot, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Carolyn Forché, Maya Angelou, Charles Simic, Ernesto Cardenal, Claribel Alegría, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, and others.
