The World So Often

Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) is one of the most read and influential Spanish writers today. He is an essayist, fiction writer, journalist, professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, and, principally, a poet. He has received numerous important honors, like the National Poetry Prize (1994) and the National Critic’s Prize (2003), both in Spain, and the Poets of the Latin World Prize (2010), in Mexico. He has published eleven books of poetry, represented in The World So Often, his first anthology in English. Luis García Montero’s poetry has commonly been considered – even by the author himself – as realist, yet this is a misinterpretation. His poetic subject doesn’t try to trap the reader in an illusory world offered up as natural, but rather to break with the automatic perception of things and facts, and so avoid catharsis. What’s crucial here is the use of a language that does not try to be transparent, a simple instrument of communication, and that