Mikel Alberdi Irizar is a book of poems dedicated to our perishable bodies and souls, and the drawings of Lurdes Larrañaga Sanz are a tribute with diffuse traits to the body and soul. Here are the two sides of the book, grouped into one. It seemed to me an accurate and appropriate title, as the poet functions as a beggar of letters, borrowing classical and cultist references, making a wink to gods, artists, writers and cities… even to the Négrima and the strength of nature. Alberdi has found himself and a bitter truth in a permanent escapist and surreal exercise: “The journey is made on foot/ say the poets/ each of my steps/ to keep corrupting/ is just silent will/”. Or “I don’t want to be straight or homo anymore/ proclaim the gland/ guarantee identity/ let my body / play new music…”. The writer takes us through certain

rings with an obsessive center. Sex, justice, search for an aesthetic... Not all of them are a topic, but a topic of conversation. But by picking up everything and dipping each line, everywhere there is death. Or that is what I thought, that the main theme is a kind of destiny and that the strategies of this life will never manage to confuse death final.En this work, which is also

uneka against poetry, the search for balance and harmony are not objectives. The beggar of the letters is bloated, raw. As existence itself is naked and hard, the poet undresses and enarms contemplation: “I don’t know why I want to write/ I struggle to write and words can never subtract/ my fluidity of thought/ I don’t know if writing does not hinder/ my vocation to disappear…”. But through disappearance, rather than disappear, suppressing, carrying, you want to develop a poetry that goes from the personal to the collective, from the forms provided to the modern and to the play of words, and from silence to the flowing word.

Mikel Alberdi, in short, wanted to make a pure poetry, full of adornments. But it's a hard place to get. I've been happier than the simple message of the poem, the mosaics of images that get screwed and complicated. More than once I have felt invaded by poems vaguely involved in cosmopolitism and by too long paths that do not lead to anything, and precisely those fatigue of the writer become a hindrance to the reader.