En Auckland ya es mañana

Published by Mansalva
Latin american fiction and poetry collection

If for Stevenson, the tourist curiosity (what he called sightseeing) was the art of disenchantment, Ulises Conti makes of the professional nomadism of the musician a way to rediscover the world. He parts from a daily surface with a rough look, taking off the picturesque blanket, either in Gorlitzer Park of Berlin’s fauna or facing the black superman who asks for a dollar for being photographed together with the passer-by in Manhattan, to discover another thing, something unexpected, always different, that his words tackle very carefully to avoid breaking it with an explanation, barely illuminated by the names of the cities on the head of the poems. The epic of the flâneur Conti is intimate. As a musician he takes the sonorous temperature of every city “secretly because I don’t like anybody laughing at me”. But getting rid of this hiding game is not as easy as it seems: as he arrives to one of the many hotels that draft his life, “I enter to the room, close my eyes and make myself invisible”, as he has breakfast, “someone every morning pretends to be me” If the successive identities of the traveler can be descartables, in him still survive, tenacious and indelible, the tattoos of an early experience, those scars of childhood that if some night seem not have followed us, “you’d be better not look under my bed”. Because the force and the beauty survive on these texts, Conti feeds of knowing that "the sound does not propagate in the emptiness".

Edgardo Cozarinsky

Ulises Conti's writing has the rare quality of transporting the reader (Something that all writers dream about, but very few achieve). And not because he writes about trips around the world, but because it is a matter of trips for that dimension out of space and time called emotion.

Cecilia Pavón