Read more
'Life asked Death why he needed her to live / And Death asked Life why she needed him to die.' So begins Miquel's El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove; a lyrical, acute, and metaphysical sequence of poems some fifteen years in the making. At the heart of Miquel's collection, we've a central image. An unnamed man in a state of constant decomposition, rotting away in the kitchen sink. Piece by piece, his slow unbinding underpins a train of images wrought in sensuous, playful, and dynamic language. Stark vignettes spun from everyday colloquy-run through with the aura of Catalonian Renaissance writings-and gilded with a patina of light, a glut of shadow, and a blur of sensory experiences. El guant de plàstic rosa houses 36 studies of the dynamics of decay. The purr and buzz of bees humming, off-stage asides, slaughtered cows, mountains made of olive stones, the hum of a permanently empty refrigerator, and edible dreams littered with dahlias and roses, with carnations and colourful chrysanthemums... Here, sex rattles the bones; Miquel's pages percolate with love, with life-with the subjectivist and social connotations of disease and decay-and on the prospect of mass destruction in a world itself on the brink of a self-inflicted extinction. In Peter Bush's visceral new translation, this chaos of signifiers sing-speaks its way through the undying days of a century beyond its "sell-by," and cogitates on life-so furnished with all its illusions and ironies-in an age consistently defined by its constant decline. Awarded the Ausiàs March de Gandia 2016, El guant de plàstic rosa defies neat categorisation, and publishes with Tenement Press in its first English language edition.
