A Handful of Dreams

About the Book

A Handful of Dreams is a project that took me over ten years, five heart breaks and a husband to complete. Now seriously, this is a dream I had when I was sixteen and it has been taking shape with every new, so to say, twist of the road. The book compiles over 90 poems organised under four headlines which try to analyse different ways of dreaming.

The first one is called Castles In The Air and it is a collection of poems about language and the aim to find your own voice. In them one can see the impact of some deconstruction theories I came across in college. In short, Coming from a bilingual society, speaking five languages myself and having chosen a foreign language to be the vehicle of my work, besides the fact I am a Philologist, the voice and the art to convey what lies within is, of course, one of my main concerns.

The second block, Delusion, compiles poems written with a bitter pen. They tell stories of delusion with people and lovers, but despite some lines may sound even somewhat harsh, they are lessons one must learn and from which to grow.

Meeting my husband and the stability he has brought about can be seen in some poems from Reverie. Maybe these are the most light-hearted of all and with some poems sincerely dedicated to my best friends and family. At the end of the day they are like the almond tree flowers in the middle of winter, the hope of life and the assurance of beauty in the world.

Awakening was the only logical ending for a dream. Here rather than waking up from a dream, it is eventually finding your voice. These poems deal with issues such as women's rights, identity, respect and more important even, self-respect.

But poets should never talk much about their work, it is the work that must speak to the reader being the latter the only author in the end. I only hope mine do this as well.

Cheers.

About the Author

I was born in 1975 in Barcelona but was raised in the countryside. My early education was fully traditionalist and quite rooted in religion, but I got in touch with more liberal perspectives at university. I took many subjects on literature and, besides studying the "cannon", I enjoyed a wide variety of discourses especially motivating were my subjects on Post-colonialism, deconstruction and gender studies. Surely influenced by many feminine voices, especially black authors like Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, and strong personalities such as Allen Ginsberg, I started experimenting with different registers of English. Due to belonging to a generation whose poetry is music, I must admit this as my main teacher.

Besides, my coming from a bilingual society (Catalan and Spanish) and speaking five languages (Catalan, Spanish, English, Swedish and some German), and moreover being a language teacher, you will surely find a great deal of concern on communication and language itself in my lines.

In 1998 I finished my degree in English at the University of Barcelona, got a job as English teacher in a Language School in Manresa.

In 2000 I met my husband, Manel, and we nowadays live in a lovely countryside town near Barcelona called Navarcles with our two sons Marc and Jordi.