The Silence of the Roofs— Melissa Niño

We leave places, but there are places that never leave us, and through language they emerge, assailing the memory, taking it as a window, approaching until they settle on the page. This is the path followed by Melissa Niño's El silencio de los tejaban. A book that brings together poems built on the memories of a developing neighborhood, on the outskirts of an urban sprawl, where pig farms, donkeys, and cobbled streets illustrate the formation of so many cities around the world.

In this book, there are poems about living in the hills, far from the sea. While a house is built, under the shelter of the corrugated tin roofs, an identity is also forged that, through poetry, reviews customs, names, objects, and beings not necessarily human, who are part of the family, like a lizard or a mango tree. Childhood is conjured in these poems. A growing body is a metaphor for the territory because it matures at the same time as the neighborhood, although it demands its own foundation, and from poetry it explores not only estrangement but also the strangeness of having left.

It is true that in poetry, temporality takes on a different meaning, and it is poetry itself that often brings us closer to the past. Where it seems there is nothing left, verses emerge to spin their threads and show us the nests that memory made in the body. Through the poems that make up this book, we are witnesses to what the poet safeguarded in her childlike eyes, and now shares with us with the maturity of her words.

ISBN: 9786072666641