Reseña del libro "The Year of the Apparitions (en Inglés)"
The objectives of this book, The Year of the Apparitions, can be summed up in one word, survival. The survival game is hard for everyone. In my case, the stories that poetry and theatre can tell are life vests fitting me amazingly well, painting was another one for a while. Stories not only help us to stay afloat, a good story is still the most powerful engine in the world, as it has been in the last few thousand years. My poems are short stories, open to interpretation, a little bit provocative, full of images. In this book I think I have managed to make my stories more solid. I believe that they are told in a way comprehensible to people from many backgrounds. We are all survivors."Sevilla’s The Year of Apparitions removes barriers between life and death, creating a chiasmus of the causality and casualty of both in a liminal world that is full of returns to childhood, nostalgia for lost innocence, unforgettable sensory experiences that never completely diminish, oral and sexual desires of a carnivalesque body that seems to be there all the time in the background, smelling ethereal smells of parties, drinks and cigarettes."The poet’s distinctive voice grapples with illusive images and voices, as well as with the physicality of the voice itself and its limitations—the fact that it can be imprisoned. What is doubtful to Sevilla, more than those illusory images and voices, is their receiver; it is the senses of the seer and the listener that cannot be trusted—an ambrosial erosion of self at the very moment of deciphering external phenomena."Unwilling to be fooled by ideologies yet recognizing that those same ideologies form an inescapable trap for the human subject, the poet’s subjective voice seems to reflect a fundamental desire for transgression, yet shows at the same time the maddening impossibility of transgression as long as it is imprisoned within language and culture. "Sevilla’s language carries an inwardness that lets signifiers sing on their own; past and present traumas unfold in between commas, overloaded words seem to be squeezed out of a grinding machine—sometimes at an amazingly speedy tempo. It is a language with an urgency to narrate experiences in a personal poetic way, yet also with an acute awareness of itself as an unreliable medium of communication; a language which knows that it creates the façade we call the world."—Ahmed ElbeshlawyIndependent Scholar of Comparative LiteratureWith this collection, Hong Kong finally has its first magic realist. These dream-nuanced pieces splatter our senses with a veritable chiaroscuro of fanciful images, phantasmagorically tripping one over another across every page. This is no chemically-inspired jaunt, but rather the psychedelic wanderings of a craftsman inspired by Borges, by Márquez and by Allende, yet – most especially in the vast sprawl that is the titular extravaganza – [it] remains sui generis. The Orient and Catalonia merge seamlessly in one kaleidoscopic poetic imbroglio!"—Vaughan RapatahanaPoet, literary critic, essayist and novelist, winner of the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize
