Affordable Angst

Mercedes Cebrián is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food, décor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game / from my child-hood: trees, houses, cars, / tiny people with fixed smiles, lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and decisions taken for you / on the little question-cards she writes in the poem 'City now or soon', but the day-to-day of the shiny new Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and in her surreal, rapid, darkly funny, lyrical poems she proves adept at putting her finger in society's wounds. Cebrián is one of the most fascinating and original voices in current Spanish poetry.