Maturity, meditation and exploration are key concepts that run through the collection of poems alienation (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2022), Lucía Orellana. This is the first time that this innovative poet from Guayaquil has published a book in her native language and not in the language of her residence, as she has four titles in English. Lucía, in fact, inhabited the world, not only countries and cities, but also cultural, spiritual and aesthetic traditions, which enriched her style, her rootedness and her lucidity. PhD in Social Psychology from the Catholic University of Guayaquil and MA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University; It is about a poet who bravely and steadfastly searches for the liberating power of language.

Before speaking about the poetic proposal of alienation, I think it is worth highlighting his political and intimate involvement, which has to do with the return. The great returns we experience in our lives are not always geographical, they can also be conceptual, linguistic or even metaphysical. Lucia Orellana’s desire to join the tradition of her country and her city, which are the territories of the Spanish language, to which she returned, in a kind of necessary catharsis, is unusual. I venture to think that, in addition to the heroine’s journey – in an attempt to give this act narrative meaning – there is also a powerful will. It was not for nothing that the poet completed, after so much writing and traveling, a master’s degree in creative writing in Spanish at New York University. The return was a conscious decision, because it always returns to childhood, to the first flash of lucidity, to the origin.

I consider it a mature book because of its ability to ask important questions, which suggest research, both about her birth in the estuary city and how she became a mother. Eastern philosophical currents follow these searches with a high sense of calmness: “because it is too late for any medicine”. Aware that she is a passing passer-by, she doesn’t want to miss anything but experimentation. For her, language is a blank canvas that, when working with writing and composition, opens the door to memory and what the Greeks called anagnorisis: maybe that’s how she discovered that love is not a fence, but a path

Each of us can speak to those words, which Lucía carves in the swirling wind of the page, as one speaks to curiosity. There is always the possibility that this exercise becomes a journey towards self-knowledge for the reader. This is the proposal of this poet. Are there significant journeys that are not towards the bottom of ourselves? The world is an excuse to get to know each other. And Lucija knows it well. Just as he knows that everything – like the Buddha of Bamiyan – can disappear. His book, however, offers us the certainty of companionship and presence among human beings as everything falls apart. “When there is language,” he writes, “there is no absence, no absence of the body; of clay, of papyrus, of stone”. (OR)