Manuel Vilas

33rd Ciudad de Melilla International Poetry Prize

In Gran Vilas, even the title signals yet another twist in that unsettling relationship between life and literature that Vilas himself has invented. The book is structured in three intense chapters: Exaltation, Democracy, and City Vilas. If it were an epic poem — and perhaps it is — we might call them three cantos.

There is politics, ideology, love, ferocity, cities, fullness, darkness, holiness, death, and truth in the poems of Gran Vilas. But above all, there is humanity and offering.

In the wake of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Manuel Vilas explores in Gran Vilas the moral limits of our contemporary lives, of our historical present. He does so through a free, fervent, and vital expressionism, with his own identity as the stage, the chant, the joy — and the breath — of the poem.