Exotica martyria
Exotica martyria was my first published poetry book. It was edited by the researcher, narrator, and poet Ricardo Llopesa in his poetry collection “La Torre de Papel” in 1991. I had met Ricardo thanks to his mythical Spanish and Central American poetry magazine Ojuebuey, which he distributed through the main bookstores in the city of Valencia. The poems of Exotica martyria are very sensory and excessively aestheticized; in fact, they revolve around the figure of Antinous and speak, as could not be otherwise, of love (or, rather, of desire). Some of them are from 1987, I even wrote them in class under Algerian effluvium, and had Carles Sanchis Ibor as my first reader. Exotica martyria is dedicated to Adolfo Villalba del Campo, Juan Manuel Vera Selma, and Ricardo himself; the first was my literature teacher at school: he made me love it above anything else, and he explained it as if he was discovering it at that very moment. Juanma was also my teacher, then a friend, and later a colleague in a research group at the University of Valencia. Ricardo, finally, was the discoverer par excellence of new voices. In his collection were also published, among others, Pedro Gandía, the late Al Berto, or Enrique Trogal.
