Intro
The kinetic momentum of a boxer: looking “up, down, right, left, front, back” while the ceiling collapses and ostriches hide their heads under their wings. El Contragolpe (and other horizontal poems) is sustained by this movement. Everything happens on a flat plane: a sand ring, the crust of the city, the edge of the Malecón… For Juan Carlos Flores, verticality is offside—by tradition/dictum of civil poetry. Like the neighborhood soccer that runs through the volume, the poem prefers the friction of the street and the pass at ground level.
However, beneath the horizontality, the hemispheres rotate: each verse measures the distance between memory and oblivion, between buildings and ruins, between a vast Siberia/Alamar of poetic collisions and an interior Siberia/Alamar.
The syntax of the ring
“I only ask God, if God exists and is not just something else among such rubble, to keep my eyes open, God, keep my eyes open.”
The syllable carries its own weight. The poem advances through force fields (arguments are banished): distances, weights, and tensions trace an energetic map, or let’s call it “Flores prosody.”
The book unfolds at the pace of a workout: combinations of jabs and hooks that are anaphora, repetitions, litanies. When the voice hammers “Bababababa” in “La Columbina,” it pierces the childlike onomatopoeia and installs a stutter where meaning self-corrects and fractures, as if language had received its own counterpunch. Hence the density of phrases copied and pasted three times, the internal rhyme of the rubble. More than a style, it is a physiology (Nietzsche nods). The transition from one segment to another is the boxer’s labored breathing before the gong:
“Sulamita, my head, a wafer on which they poured cement, guajirita, my head, a wafer on which they poured cement, my head cracked, sulamita, my head cracked, guajirita.”
Perhaps—as that poet who measured snowfall in syllables warned—meter (always present, even when speaking the invisible language) is a moral metronome: each stroke of the bell reminds us of language that cannot hide from its pulse.
Cartography of the suburb
“Because we are not in China, not even in one of the many Chinatowns of America, but in Alamar, a place of mixtures, where these things happen.”
It is worth remembering that the page is also a coordinate and that breathing dictates the length of the verse, just as the docks determine the depth of the bay.
Alamar—that socialist experiment in prefabricated blocks—reappears as a coastal Aleph: neighborhood, archipelago, future (present!) archaeological ruin. We read again: “place of mixtures, where these things happen.” Flores takes note of his creatures: the kung fu master who prays to Christ, the African students who leave an echo of Bob Marley, the messenger who deciphers the ration book as if it were a Babylonian palimpsest. The poem displays and spins, like a revolving display case, the debris of late socialism.
Here geography becomes biography: coordinates become scars, and the mapamundi fits in the palm of a boxing glove.
Poetics of minor sports
[…] “I know what it means to belong to a soccer team, I know what it means to get it right and I know what it means to get it wrong, art or soccer or war, working for something is tiring, working for nothing is more tiring” […]
The poet takes on the role of geographer: he measures, traces, and names until the neighborhood reveals itself as a polis, each brick a tectonic memory.
Few poets have read Sunday television with such attention. Baggio misses the penalty that would have brought Italy closer to the World Cup; the narrator understands that “working for nothing is more tiring.” David Tresegué (sic) smiles, and the question “Why is the cheerful striker laughing after trying one shot after another without scoring?” becomes emblematic of creative obstinacy. The collection thus adopts the epic of the trivial: neighborhood marathons, Greco-Roman wrestling in vacant lots, a crazy old man pushing a wheelbarrow full of excrement through the corridors of a prison. Each micro-gesture prolongs the Homeric tradition at ground level, where the running track is a cracked avenue and the stadium a wasteland.
Inventory of the twisted
“Factories of the twisted… where twisted guild members perform their rites.”
The verse diagnoses a moral economy: the regime’s recycled materials (metal, concrete, slogans) are returned to the poem as semiotic scrap. Hence the bestiary of prostheses—amputated limbs that dream of their absence—and the obsession with “lost parts.” Horizontality is then revealed as trauma: only those who crawl perceive the lack, the void, the piece that does not fit. Because every ruin—every brick without a wall to hold it—is a lexeme that is losing its vowels.
Counter-canon and heresy
[…] “anti-country needs anti-poet in the same way that anti-poet needs anti-country, when, anti-country, narcissistically, does not want to recognize itself in anti-poems, anti-poet becomes a political enemy” […]
Flores writes after the shipwreck of meta-narratives. His “anti-country” needs an “anti-poet,” and vice versa, until both terms become indistinguishable. Thus, the voice ventures into a territory without legitimate genealogy, where tradition is learned in graffiti and jingles: reggae, hip-hop, sports commentary, Yoruba proverbs. The result is a palimpsest that imitates the archaeology of epigraphs, footnotes, and figurative mosaics: criticism ceases to be commentary and becomes montage. Where genealogy is lacking, he invents a lineage: he translates graffiti into Latin until he achieves the epic.
Listen to what Flores says between the lines: like a wrong time zone, the canon always arrives late to the place where life has already happened.
Epilogue
El Contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) demonstrates that a poem can be at once a neighborhood chronicle, a treatise on political anatomy, and a boxer’s training regimen. Its horizontal gaze does not abdicate height; it simply reverses the axis: the summit is at shoe level, where dust, sweat, and saliva compose the true Sistine Chapel of the present. Flores forces us to read crouched down (his poems are always performances), attentive to the mosaic formed by the pebbles. And as we travel across that smooth surface left by “the steamroller,” we understand that contemporary poetry may not need to raise columns: it is enough to know, like the lonely runner, to be alone “for the pleasure of being alone.”
In Cuban literature, Lezama Lima was the Dante of the Republic’s poetry—the revolutionary Lezama had to die young, because the Baroque is always counter-reform—; Juan Carlos Flores was the last Virgil of the inner circles of the island’s communist hell, the cartographer of an epic that can only be read if we put our heads at the level of the dust, among the ruins.
Image: La Rivolta (1911), by Luigi Russolo.
