Fiat Lux - by Paula Abramo (Paperback)

About the Book

Fiat Lux is biographical and lyrical, all at once. The poems are whimsical, committed, fierce, political, and always pushing the limits of what language can do.

Book Synopsis

Paula Abramo's Fiat Lux evokes the poet's ancestors who were political refugees from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil and then from Brazil to Bolivia and finally Mexico. At the same time, it is a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing characters to life with fidelity and imagination. The hinge connecting the two themes is the recurring image of striking a match. (Abramo's grandmother worked in a match factory in Brazil producing the brand called Fiat Lux, Latin for "let there be light.")

Abramo lives and works in Mexico City. When Words Without Borders asked local writer Lucia Duero, "what writers from here should we read?" she selected a single book by a living author: "Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life."

The language of the poems is whimsical, committed, sometimes fierce, sometimes political, and always concerned with words, language, and languages. Each vignette evokes a moment. Together, they are nearly a novel.

Review Quotes

Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo is a great story about the human journey and courage, marvelously captured in the poetics of everyday life.

- Lucia Duero, Words Without Borders

There are those who think that in the beginning came light and the transparent word. In Fiat Lux-a book as dazzling as a match at the moment of ignition-Paula Abramo shows that in the beginning came translation and exile, friction and chiaroscuro. And she does this with a musicality, verbal imagination, educated humor and historical and political consciousness rarely seen in her generation, or in any other.

- Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, author of 50 estados: 13 poetas and Lyric Poetry is Dead

Paula Abramo renders enormities-exile, prison, geography, industrial chemistry-with sinuous precision. Here is a powerful sense of lives lived at the behest of various forces-economic, political, corporate-yet free in the deep, explicit sense of a hand striking a match. The sheer dynamism of this collection casts a steady, inventive spell.

- Baron Wormser, author of Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems and Legends of the Slow Explosion

The writing in Fiat Lux confirms the good news: the opening of new channels in Mexican poetry after years of stagnation.

- La Tempestad, Mexico City

One of the best collections by young authors in recent years, highly polished poetry that takes up the most concrete things without ever becoming prosaic, that joins classical references with the most contemporary poetics while effortlessly displaying an enormous range of expressive resources.

- Elsa Cross, author of Jaguar, Espirales and winner of Mexico's Xavier Villurrutia Prize

Fiat Lux is poetry of high quality in its minute attention to detail, its exploration of the possibility of language, and an original poetic voice that explores lyricism without relying on 'elevated' conventions of diction or tone.

- Paulo da Luz Moreira, Caracol, University of São Paulo.

Paula Abramo's Fiat Lux-a mesmerizing exploration of the borders between languages, countries, generations, and histories both epic and intimate in scope-is among the most remarkable works in contemporary Mexican poetry. And Dick Cluster's English translation of these rich and intricate poems makes me want to stand up and cheer: it crackles, glimmers, sings. Together, poet and translator bring us a breathtaking polyphony, a thousand lit matches, a radiance that changes and grows with every read.

- Robin Myers, poet & translator, author of Having/Tener and Else/Lo demás, translator of Cristina Rivera Garza and Andrés Neuman

By illuminating, like the match's flame, the instant's contour in the fog of time, this subtle book-the best poetry book I've read in many years-reveals more than what it suggests and suggests more than what it reveals.

- Pedro Poitevin, Salem State University, author of Perplejidades

After reading this amazing, unique and mind-blowing little book, readers will think differently about words like pain or identity or family. Paula Abramo proves that there are territories where only poetry can take us.

- Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet and Multiple Choice