Gemma Gorga

Gemma Gorga Poems

Gemma Gorga Biography

Gemma Gorga, born 1968 in Barcelona, is a Catalan Poet. Gemma Gorga has a PhD in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Barcelona, where she currently works as a professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. In 1996 she won the Rosa Leveroni Prize for poetry with Bordology (Parsifal, 1997). After, she published Disorder of the Hands (Pagès, 2003) and Optic Instruments (Brosquil, 2005), and in 2006 she won the Miquel de Palol Prize for poetry with Book of Minutes (Columna), in which she uses small prose poems as a tool for knowledge her own experience. Among non-fiction she has published with Antoni Lozano, Within the Natural Kitchen: Heath, Tradition and Pleasure at the Table (Ara Llibres, 2004), which combine tradition, gastronomy and dietetics. Some of her poems have been included in anthologies and translated to Basque, English, Slovakian, and Polish.)

The Best Poem Of Gemma Gorga

Baptism

Each evening I read again all the letters
you've never written me and that I keep in transparent
boxes so thieves won't be able to find them
- for how will they see air in air, light in light?
There are many pasts existing in the past, many
memories that ramify like small
capillaries of time. Also memory is everything
we never managed to live, to see, to tell ourselves,
everything that remained lightly adhering
in our hearts, like an eyelash about to fly.
Dead before their birth but, all the same, souls
do no stop being souls. All they need is the cold water
of baptism and someone who knows how to believe in them.

Translated by Julie Wark

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