Pedro Poitevin: An Architect of Poetic Form
In the living borderlands between number and word, order and invention, Pedro Poitevin has carved a space for himself as both a mathematician and a poet. His voice, crisp yet elusive, fluent in the neighboring tongues of Spanish and English—and the even older tongue of form—has come to occupy a singular corner in the literary cosmos.
Poitevin, born in Guatemala and a mathematician by training, speaks of verse the way a physicist might speak of light: wave and particle, music and measure. He holds a rare position in contemporary literature; a poet as fluent in equations as in metaphor, who suggests that symmetry can uncover emotional truths just as powerfully as chaos. While constraint-based poetry is often aligned with the cerebral, Poitevin’s poems contain genuine feeling, compressed and intensified by the very limits they inhabit.
Poitevin, born in Guatemala and a mathematician by training, speaks of verse the way a physicist might speak of light: wave and particle, music and measure. He holds a rare position in contemporary literature; a poet as fluent in equations as in metaphor, who suggests that symmetry can uncover emotional truths just as powerfully as chaos. While constraint-based poetry is often aligned with the cerebral, Poitevin’s poems contain genuine feeling, compressed and intensified by the very limits they inhabit.
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His 2023 collection Nowhere at Home (Penteract Press, UK) brings together an array of formal experiments—self-referential verse, constraint-driven structures, and, notably, palindromes of staggering ambition. The title speaks to the condition of the bilingual writer, the immigrant, the border-walker. But it also gestures toward an artistic mode: to belong fully in neither language, neither direction of time, and yet to write fluently from that very center.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in “Bilingual Sonnet,” a poem that reads the same in both directions, and in both languages. Line by line, it moves through English and Spanish with mirrored precision, a feat of formal ingenuity that feels as if a sonnet were composed inside a kaleidoscope. Each turn revealing a symmetrical world stitched from two languages, endlessly folding back on itself. Trae hoy alpina cima el dios traedor. Ese sumo detalle ver ideé. Se mostró sin rubor de plata. Fe, es por creer final posees honor... ...the sonnet continues, curving gracefully from Spanish into English and back again: See fatal Pedro burn—I sort some seed; I revel late. Do muses erode art? So idle am I… Can I play, O’ Heart? To call this merely a palindrome would be a disservice. It might be, as far as we know, the world’s first bilingual palindromic sonnet, and it represents Poitevin’s most radical claim: that constraint can be liberation, that discipline is a form of freedom. |
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These unique forms can also be found in Poetevin's Spanish collections such as Ícaro hace piruetas en las nubes (Urania, 2023) and Letras griegas (Praxis, México, 2022), where each poem is a balancing act, a dive into logic and language. The collections are technically audacious as they are heartfelt. To delve in these poems is to swim in the depths of both form and wonder.
Poitevin has never been loud about his ambitions. Yet his work has found its way into unexpected corners of the literary world; places that don’t always speak to one another, but somehow speak to him. He is a poet of bridges: between disciplines, tongues, and logics.
In 2022, Poitevin was awarded the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, honoring his poetic innovation. Then, in 2025, he received the Premio Internacional Rever de Poesía Palindrómica; a prize that, like Poitevin’s work itself, rewards both linguistic dexterity, as well as vision. It was a fitting accolade for a writer who has made the palindrome not just a literary form, but a philosophy.
To read Poitevin is to be reminded that poetry can still astonish; not through excess, but through exactitude. His is a world of measured wonder, where lines loop and circle, but always land. If so much contemporary verse strives to break the line, Poitevin bends it, folds it, reverses it—until it sings a different song.
Poitevin has never been loud about his ambitions. Yet his work has found its way into unexpected corners of the literary world; places that don’t always speak to one another, but somehow speak to him. He is a poet of bridges: between disciplines, tongues, and logics.
In 2022, Poitevin was awarded the Juana Goergen Poetry Prize, honoring his poetic innovation. Then, in 2025, he received the Premio Internacional Rever de Poesía Palindrómica; a prize that, like Poitevin’s work itself, rewards both linguistic dexterity, as well as vision. It was a fitting accolade for a writer who has made the palindrome not just a literary form, but a philosophy.
To read Poitevin is to be reminded that poetry can still astonish; not through excess, but through exactitude. His is a world of measured wonder, where lines loop and circle, but always land. If so much contemporary verse strives to break the line, Poitevin bends it, folds it, reverses it—until it sings a different song.
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