Next Friday, May 10, the new book by Puerto Rican author Mario Trecek (Narvaja Editor) will be presented at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair at the Stand of the Province of Córdoba, Ocre Pavilion, at 6:00 p.m.
The work includes a series of poems whose thematic axis is toxic relationships, the rarefied environment in which we operate, the blows of the pandemic whose greatest impact was the lung disease, the asthma of his grandmother, his niece, and pulmonary emphysema, when her father told her “Mariecito, take me to the clinic, I can’t breathe.” And above all, the title arises from that tragic episode, when the police in Maryland, USA, suffocated the black citizen, George Floyd, by placing their knees on the basketball player’s neck, and he repeated it, according to what his sister Filonise declared in the North American justice system. , up to twenty times: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”
His literature crosses the personal and the social, as the author of the prologue, the writer Mariano Saravia, expresses: “This book moves me doubly, because it takes me everywhere and everywhere. It reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I once read an interview with Gabriel García Márquez in which he said that he had wanted to write the total novel, that is, to tell everything in that novel. And in this case, too, everything…is everything. This book of poetry gives me the same feeling, because it takes me through the local and the universal, through family and society, through Hiroshima and Río Tercero.
“It is pure alchemy, because it mixes Palmira, Rome and the Andean towns. Stanislavky with Che and Tere Andruetto. Kafka and Fortunato Ramos. It is existential and visceral at the same time.
The cover of “I can’t breathe” is illustrated with a watercolor and charcoal work by Belén Ortega Villafañe, very significant and moving.
“In one of his poems he tells us ‘I love the Third River, I hate it, before I only loved it.’ Because since he was a child, talking about breathing, he learned to swim against the current with the swollen river, or get away from Perón’s Tosca, in the vortex of a whirlpool, hit the bottom, hold his breath and emerge triumphant, but it also has to do with the fatal decision of an artist like Chifle, or the mother of his best friend, or one fateful night, after one of the last floods, that is, the overflowing of the Ctalamochita, he was anxiously searching for his family, for a loved one.”
This book of poems has on the cover a work in watercolor and charcoal by Belén Ortega Villafañe, very significant and moving, and on the back cover a brief text by Norberto Barleand, a poet from Buenos Aires, who expresses in one of its sections: “In “His verses illuminate the landscape with his games, childhood, family, friends, the river and his world of dreams and experiences that he describes with images full of reflections.”
Anthology
Furthermore, the day after the presentation, Saturday the 11th, at 7 p.m., at Stand 337 Blue Pavilion, of the 48th Buenos Aires International Fair, the anthology “Del Río Suquía al Río de Oro” will be presented, in which poets from Córdoba participate. , among them Mario Trecek and Jorge Alacevich, compiled by the writers Marta Díaz and Kari Krenn, at the request of the representative of the Polisario Front in Argentina, the poet Mohamed Alí Alí Salem, about the Republic of Western Sahara.
The anthology “Del Río Suquía al Río de Oro” will also be presented, in which poets from Córdoba participate, including Mario Trecek and Jorge Alacevich, compiled by the writers Marta Díaz and Kari Krenn.
All the poems and poets pay homage to the Sahrawi people, and their culture, which has been fighting for its definitive independence, a nomadic people, who today, almost their entire population is in a refugee camp in Morocco, or Mauritania, or in their own territory. It is one of the African countries facing the Atlantic, approximately opposite the Canary Islands, but economically devastated. This anthology will be presented on July 12 at the Córdoba Library, in Córdoba capital.
