In Retrospect: An Interview with María Auxiliadora Álvarez, Author of A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with poet María Auxiliadora Álvarez. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. From her early writing to her most recent collection, we’re looking to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Álvarez’s body of work. Her 2025 collection A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza was selected as the latest winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry and is available in both English and Spanish from Akashic Books. Here, she walks us through her life in poetry thus far, from an early rhyming, narrative poem, to lyrical nostalgic poetry, poems of mourning, poems for her children, and onward toward increasingly abstract and silent poetry.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
María Auxiliadora Álvarez: My earliest memory of poetry takes me back to the day I discovered the metaphor. It happened one afternoon while I was rummaging through the books in my father’s library. Suddenly, my attention fell on the title of a book by a Venezuelan poet named Andrés Eloy Blanco. The title was Stone Ship. I was perhaps 9 years old, and I remember spending a few nights overwhelmed by the certainty that the ship was going to sink. I imagined an immense mass of stone descending without stopping into the darkness at the bottom of the water. However, in a sudden instant, like an unexpected lightning bolt in the depths of grief, the ship floated in my mind, its image hovering at the water’s surface with all its enormous, gray dignity. At that moment, I knew there was another reality behind the words and behind the appearance of reality. Reading and thinking then became more solitary exercises for me: the uncertain wait for the stone that would emerge (or not) from the immensity of the water was a tension that absorbed my entire being, and required total concentration. By the age of twelve, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Pearl S. Buk, and A. J. Cronin were already my daily companions, and thus, the first poem I wrote was very narrative. It emerged after reading The Arabian Nights, and was a very long, rhyming, didactic, and moralistic fictional poem. It narrated the life of an ancient Persian king, much loved and respected in his region, whose son, however, vain and lacking in virtue, chose a different life story that ended very badly.
On the other hand, and I didn’t realize it at the time, the production of that poem sought to show me the intense connection between the act of reading and the act of writing—although I can only perceive the magnitude of the power of that connection from the perspective of my current life. The content was the product of an imagination enchanted by the Arab world, but the exercise of writing it opened the first door of interrelation with the mystery world for me: I no longer waited, with impotent anguish, for the stone to float alone on the water; now I could also “help” it regain its surface.
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as either the launch point, catalyst, or axle your first collection of poetry spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
MA: My first collection of poems brought together youthful, lyrical, and idealistic poems filled with nostalgia for my grandparents and my homeland. My second collection of poems consisted of a harsh and realistic indictment entitled “Body.” The central theme of this second book was the act of childbirth in its most visceral and eschatological sense, and the central poem combined anger and tenderness with social criticism. All the poems in that book reconstructed with words the sordid grounds of the hospital and the wounds of the body, but the concreteness per se was insufficient to survive as an enunciation of life because it lacked the precision of a symbol. Over time, these imprecise and damaged fabrics were regenerated textually by and for another form of writing: a succinct, abstract, and silent poetry.
FP: What lessons did writing and publishing your first collection of poetry teach you that you applied to the process of creating your second collection?
MA: The psychological experience of feeling the weight of real life imposing itself on the writing in my second poetry collection (which to me feels like my first) drove home the question of the integrity of the body (and of the text) and its preponderance. Although the specific case involved the act of childbirth and the moment a person is born, I generally meant to refer to all the physical circumstances that diminish us in appearance or weaken our reasoning. This (re)cognition suddenly fractured my previous idea of the self (and of the text) as a reverberating receptacle of life and energy, replacing the (idealized) expression of song with the more realistic one of crying. This crucial difference between comedy and tragedy showed me two worlds—partly incompatible: the world of the idea and the world of the “thing.” This new perception of myself and of the other (being, world, or thing) radically transformed my way of thinking and, consequently, my way of writing. Formally, from that book (Cuerpo) I learned, both theoretically and practically, that in extreme situations there is no room for narratives, but rather, the risky exercise of merely naming urgency in dangerous conditions demands a very precise mental breathing, capable of transforming the raw material of experience into a useful object of study, or into an artistic object—detached from its origin, autonomous and free. I have produced very few narrative poems since then.
FP: Tell us about your latest published collection of poetry. Could you briefly map out its evolution from a starting point to the final draft?
MA: The subject of my previous book, Piedra en :U: (Stone in :U:) 2016, is the Balkan War. I spent a lot of time in the region between 2005 and 2013, as my eldest daughter, Laura, worked as a war crimes lawyer at the Hague Commission in Zagreb, Croatia. The highest walls of the cities and countries involved remained pierced by machine gun fire, houses moved like debris hanging in the air, streets were full of graves, church pews were empty, and widows (covered in black from head to toe) rioted at the altars like someone arguing an old union-to-union dispute. Many poems in Stone in :U: were born from that experience. In a graphic sense, the title image represents the cavity of the mouth seen from an aerial perspective: in the center is the U-shaped tongue, and on either side are several promontories (the molars) circumscribing the territory. If language were suddenly to lose its organicity in a plastic representation or under a rictus mortem, for example, we would find ourselves with a small “stone” rendered useless by the supremacy of limits. With the graphic image of language—as a letter—turned into an inorganic compound, I wanted to represent language facing the risk of its inherent uselessness, should the circumstances arise.
When that book Piedra en :U: (it was only published in Spanish) was closed, I slowly began to write other poems, as I always do, until in 2024, when I began to group the long-gestating poems for this new book, A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza, which is now being published, I realized that the poems were, for the most part, hard, cold, dry, difficult, and dense. They distilled a brutal devastation—the truth is that one can never measure the predatory reach of adversity. So, I began to look for other poems written in much earlier periods but never published, whose moods were more transparent and whose textures were more ductile. I then undertook, for the first time in my writing life, the titanic technical—and primarily moral—task of combining different mental periods of writing, interspersing older poems with more recent ones to balance the soft, the neutral, the bitter, attempting to reconstruct a more comprehensive philosophical atmosphere less influenced by circumstances (including the pandemic).
But there are spiritual fractures that never heal, that can take years to heal, or that, once healed, never disappear, and I hope that this title, “A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza,” will record my final poems on mourning, for I sense it as my “final inventory of losses,” in accordance with the teachings of all spiritual schools: “He who has nothing loses nothing.” The final poems in this new book nevertheless illustrate the timid morning that one day dawned after the long night of mourning. That morning taught me that the marks of fractures create mirror games that (in any case) reflect the light. They reflect the sun that was my father, to whom this and all my other books are dedicated since his passing. My father was a unique human being, a poet, a non-fiction writer, a profound and kind thinker, and my best friend.
FP: What running themes or fascinations do you identify throughout your poetry, from your earliest poems to your most recent ones?
MA: The perception of the drawing (or interaction) of the figure in space has been an involuntary and constant activity for me. As much as the perception of the figure itself, which acquires a symbolic relationship and evolution. Perhaps that’s why my poems are full of images: I expect everything from them. However, I rarely write to praise what I admire (which is naturally integrated into my becoming and doesn’t easily detach itself). I usually write about what hurts or affects me. It’s like an unconscious mechanism to remove the “ballast”; and look again, as if clearing things. That’s when I write, but I don’t write to affirm; I write to question or to deny. What seems harmonious to me integrates within me, and what doesn’t find harmony is what separates itself, and it’s in this separation that I work. It would be like saying that I analyze, trying to fill in, what is interspersed outside of my expectations.
In my youth, I wrote many love poems that I didn’t publish but kept. The themes that have remained since then have been family, absence, silence, language, fear, loneliness, and death. My first book was passionate, effusive, and reverberant; the second was harsh, direct, and concise; the third was more reserved; and so from then on, my writing gradually and paradoxically became a field of silence. Now, gestures predominate almost entirely (over the slightest anecdote or reference).
I believe that living without my native language for most of my life has determined the formation of my writing, whose scarce nature, however, has saved me—to a certain extent—from losing it completely. The experience of exile has meant salvation and condemnation for me simultaneously. I have become what in sociology they call a hobo, a free being, without fixed cultural affiliations (salvation), but devoid of language (condemnation). The worst exile for a woman writer: leaving the cultural periphery of genre allineation to enter the other great periphery of linguistic, political, and racial alienation.
FP: Finally, as you are writing currently (or simply thinking, which is where writing often starts), what is something—an idea, social issue, piece of art, song, etc.—that you are obsessed with?
MA: Now I’m writing fiction so I can have a home (according to Ann Carson’s definition) where I can rest, and I’m organizing poems I’ve written for my children over four and a half decades (though not continuously), and I’ve never shown them to them or published them. I think I owe them that timid but permanent homage. If I were to start over, I probably wouldn’t write everything the same way again, because I always feel closer to what I’m writing at the moment, but just as with bones and children, familiar gestures that I can’t help but recognize reappear in every feature. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop writing (even if it’s a little or succinctly), but the path of emptiness isn’t built all at once, and I think there’s a certain kindness in gradually giving way to silence. After almost three decades of living in silence in the United States, I think my mind has begun to distance itself from discursive faculties (narrating or conversing). But it also seems, judging by the brief but remaining writing, that the activity of observing, interpreting, speculating—in short, thinking—is an intrinsic function of the mind, capable of dispensing with words, its greatest or most precise expression. Even so, I don’t know if I’m already headed toward total silence. Perhaps a rhetorical concern, in a general sense?
