A warning: there are monsters in this volume. That of health, that of the body—the other, our own—that accompany us, so much ours. The search for Breathing Exercises takes place in the darkness, tempting the hidden forms of anxiety and pain. A door that remains open in dreams, the agonizing atmosphere of hospitals, the limbo that every traveler inhabits, the somatizations of the organism that, by remaining silent, speak. A path that leads from samsara to nirvana and that leads us to accept the need to rediscover the rhythm with which we breathe; the rhythm with which we seize—and then let go—of what hurts us, surrounds us, and shapes us.

Who is the father, the one who now—the immutable time of memory—is dying? What ideas, what secrets shaped his actions, his silences? The Mexican corporate state gravitates around this grave moment. The heir sets out to tell it: he draws on scattered moments, milestones of memory, pieces surrounded by emptiness that nonetheless connect with each other. The son who grew up under the scrutinizing, estranged gaze of the lawyer, the curator, the protective husband, the ironclad guide; his duty is to portray his father as faithfully as eyes full of love and fear allow.

From his first poems, which named the grace of an inaugural world, to the complexity of his most recent explorations, Hernán Bravo Varela has constructed a writing style that challenges the prestige of what is poetically accepted, as evidenced by the dialogue between these two collections of poems. An explorer of new verbal routes, a juggler of rhythms and silences, the kaleidoscope of his verse has been transformed before the eyes of his readers, who consider him a singular artist, an indispensable poet, who adds new figures to the fresco of the present.