It's a way of putting it. There's something artificial about it. I write about my mother. […] My mother's death turned my world upside down: I saw it turn into a bubble covered in knives, an ashamed predator. And I became a ghost learning to walk again,” writes León Plascencia Ñol at the beginning of Historial Médico (Clinical History). Throughout these pages, poetry adopts numerous strategies to address its electrifying subject matter: testimony and notes, list and photo album, and even diagnosis, pharmacopoeia, and death certificate. The well-tempered song is replaced by feverish vision, and poetry becomes delirium: once the furrow is opened, a metaphor not only for verse but for the wound, it distances itself from it, a critical and focused distance. There is no other way, no more and no less, to plow in the void.

Historia Médico (Clinical History) not only represents Plascencia Ñol's most personal book; it also forms a dazzling chapter of our elegiac poetry. Between Something about the Death of the Major (Sabines) and José Carlos Becerra's Oscura Palabra (Dark Word); between Enriqueta Ochoa's Electra's Return; Coral Bracho's Ese espacio, ese jardín (That Space, That Garden) and Antígona González Sara Uribe's Historial Médico stands out in its own right, with the Pyrrhic victory of someone who claims that "the language is not spoken."