THE POETRY OF ISABEL PÉREZ MONTALBÁN: AN ACCOUNT OF LACK

Abstract

The poetry of Isabel Pérez Montalbán: An account of lack

Isabel Pérez Montalbán (Córdoba, 1964, resident in Malaga) has already consolidated a highly personal and differentiable poetic voice in the concert of Spanish poetry of recent decades. From a geopolitics located in the poor Andalusian south, her poetry elaborates an account of the lack. It underlines the position of subalternity occupied by women in Spanish society, accentuated by her condition as a worker (often unemployed) and a member of the most humble layers of their city of origin, Córdoba. However, this gesture of biographical self-reference does not isolate her from a social group (not only female) that faces those same conditions of procrastinati tion and poverty. The author claims a necessary struggle from a poetics full of denunciation, but nourished by an affective turn that gives her a privileged position in the current Spanish poetic panorama. Not only is it a representative voice of neosocial poetics and resistance to to the socio-political statu quo, but it exhibits an innovative gender perspective becoming a versatile artisan of the style.