#PopsugarReadingChallenge Book 25: Xeixa

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book whose title starts with X.
Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets, edited & translated by Marlon L. Fick & Francisca Esteve.

This is what I love about the Popsugar challenge: some of the books I need for it are already on my shelf. And others are books, like this one, that I would never have thought to pick up. I love poetry, but I know zip about Catalan language or literature. What I found was a book of very accessible, interesting, beautiful poems. The title (pronounced zhay-zha) is a Catalan word for a rare type of wheat that the editors use to symbolize beauty and excellence.

The volume includes ten men poets and four women. We get Teresa Pascual's poems of rural life, Celia Sanchez-Mustich's arguments with God, and my favorite, Manuel Forcano's love poems.

You feel the body
like a mountain that gives its stones
to make into houses. You feel the tenderness
of a statue in the hands of an archaeologist.
The joy of a sundial
at dawn.

There are also a lot of poems about poetry, like Rosa Font Massot's "All the Seas:"

One book is all books:
light of the cosmos, letters of thousands
of existing alphabets, lost or not yet come to be.
One voice is the voice of all those who do not speak,
the voice of the forgotten, the voiceless:
it is yours and mine.

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