Deseos/Longings/J'aimerais tant
Gustavo Gac-Artigas

In the act of being articulated, desire both deepens and diminishes. In Deseos/ Longings/ J’aimerais tant, Chilean writer Gustavo Gac-Artigas captures the nuances of this paradox in poems of searing emotional clarity. When fully lived, his poems insist, life is concurrently elegy and ode, a love song made more urgent and ardent by its underlying ephemerality.

In these twenty-nine poems rendered in three languages (Spanish, French, and English) that amplify the echoes of ‘longing’ and its lyrical polyphony, Gac-Artigas gives voice to life’s submersions, tempests and shipwrecks, but above all to redeeming love and its arsenal of surprises. “I don’t know why I fell in love/and maybe that’s why/I’m still in love,” the speaker confesses in one of the many poems about the beloved, summoning us to see mystery as a gift, a force perhaps akin to that at work in duende. At the same time, if to love is to know “the master and the beggar,” “the torturer/and the tortured,” then to love is to know torment. “I knew the hands of rage,” the poet writes, “and rage gentled my hands.”

An opening sequence that sets the collection’s meditative tone with the “how I long”/ “how I wish” refrain underscores the human desire for the impossible or near-impossible, whether in the form of excising one’s fears or being granted “strength to crush the tyrant,” or as a wish to be “foam/to shelter the dead/who lie at the bottom of the sea.” However, these are not poems of lament or crippling nostalgia, but rather homages to our ravenous capacity to love, regret, and re-learn how to navigate a world that remains, for now, fragrant and spiced with cinnamon, saffron, cloves, and boldo leaves.

A border-crosser of many kinds –including geopolitical, linguistic, cultural—Gac-Artigas gives us, in Deseos/ Longings/ J’aimerais tant, what Milan Kundera might call “a moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”  In his invocation to humanity, he pleads, “anchor my vagabond mind/to the desecrated word” “and let my dreams survive in yours,” and this collection enables exactly that.

Gustavo Gac-Artigas: Writer, poet and playwright from Chile. His poetry has been featured in Multicultural Echoes (CSU-Chico), Enclave, (CUNY), RANLE, Fonoteca de poesía, Revista Kametsa, and in several anthologies. He is a Corresponding Member of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE). Work in progress: poetry collection, hombre de américa/man of America.

Deseos/Longings/J’aimerais tant is a publication by Ediciones Nuevo Espacio. Click here to purchase.

Reviewed by
Mihaela Moscaliuc
​9/9/2021

Mihaela Moscaliuc’s most recent poetry collection is Cemetery Ink (2021). She translated Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper, and co-edited Border Lines: Poems of Migration. She teaches at Monmouth University.

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