Friday in Jerusalem and Other Poems

Marco Antonio Campos’s work can be considered a response to the dialogic poetry that arose in Latin America beginning in the 1950s. The latter is characterized by radical disregard for solipsism, opposition to capitalism and neo-colonialism, opening up to popular culture, democratization of language, and formal experimentation. By contrast, in Campos’s poems, like in many by his contemporaries, morality is given priority over politics, feeling over reason, plain style over experimentation. In his case, a displacement from time history and biography toward space city and home is carried out, and poetry becomes chronicle. Yet this reaction is normal, intrinsic to the evolution of Latin American poetry, self-aware and adamant in its refusal to stagnate. Accordingly, Campos’s work is no less conscious of the other, no less socially participative or aesthetically restless than that of his immediate predecessors. As Roger Munier suggests, in the end, each of Campos’s books debates “his relentlessly questioned identity,” but in a different way that ultimately continues to be dialogic and to require an active reader.